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A FORTNIGHT OF 


FOLLY. 



By MAUEICE THOMPSON. 


Author of ‘’‘‘Songs of Fair Weather,"'"' “Sylvan Secrets," “A Talla- 
hasse Girl," “ By-Ways and Bird Notes," “A Banker of 
Bankersville," “At Love's Extremes,"' etc. 




NEW YORK : 

B. ALDEN, PUBLISHEK, 
1888. 


Copyright, 1888 , 

BY 

THE ALDEN PUBLISHING COMPANY 




A FORTNIGHT OF 
FOLLY. 


I. 

The Hotel Helicon stood on a great rock 
promontory that jutted far out into a sea of air 
whose currents and eddies filled a wide, wild val- 
ley in the midst of our southern mountain re- 
gion. It was a neAV hotel, built by a Cincinnati 
man who founded his fortune in natural gas 
speculations, and who had conceived the bright 
thought of making the house famous at the 
start by a stroke of rare liberality. 

Viewing the large building from any favorable 
point in the valley, it looked like a huge white bird 
sitting with outstretched wings on the gray rock 
far up against the tender blue sky. All around 
it the forests were thick and green, the ravines 
deep and gloomy and the rocks tumbled into 
fantastic heaps. When you reached it, which 
was after a whole day of hard zig-zag climbing, 
you found it a rather plain three-story house, 
whose broad verandas were worried with a mass 
of jig-saw fancies and whose windows glared at 
you between wide open green Venetian shutters. 
Everything look new, almost raw, from the stumps 
of fresh-cut trees on the lawn and the rope swings 
and long benches, upon which the paint was 
scarcely dry, to the resonant floor of the spacious 
halls and the cedar-fragrant hand-rail of the 
stairway. 


5 


6 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

i’bere were springs among the rocks. Here 
the water trickled out with a red gleam of iron 
oxide, there it sparkled with an excess of car- 
bonic acid, and yonder it bubbled up all the 
more limpid and clear on account of the offen- 
sive sulphuretted hydrogen it was bringing forth. 
Masses of fern, great cushions of cool moss and 
tangles of blooming shrubs and vines fringed 
the sides of the little ravines down which the 
spring-streams sang their way to the silver 
thread of a river in the valley. 

It was altogether a dizzy perch, a strange, in- 
convenient, out-of-the-way spot for a summer 
hotel. You reached it all out of breath, con- 
fused as to the points of the compass and dis- 
appointed, in every sense of the word, with 
what at first glance struck you as a colossal 
pretense, empty, raw, vulgar, loud — a great 
trap into which you had been inveigled by an 
eloquent hand-bill I Hotel Helicon, as a name 
for the place, was considered a happy one. It 
had come to the proprietor, as if in a dream, one 
day as he sat smoking. He slapped his thigh 
with his hand and sprang to his feet. The word 
that went so smoothly with hotel, as he fancied, 
had no special meaning in his mind, for the gas 
man had never been guilty of classical lore- 
study, but it furnished a taking alliteration. 

“ Hotel Helicon, Hotel Helicon,” he repeated ; 
“that’s just a dandy name. Hotel Helicon on 
Mount Boab, open for the season! If that 
doesn’t get ’em. I’ll back down.” 

His plans matured themselves very rapidly 


A Fortnight of Folly. 7 

in his mind. One brilliant idea followed another 
in swift succession, until at last he fell upon the 
scheme of making Hotel Helicon free for the 
initial season to a select company of authors 
chosen from among the most brilliant and 
famous in our country. 

“Zounds ! ” he exclaimed, all to himself, “but 
won’t that be a darling old advertisement ! I’ll 
have a few sprightly newspaper people along 
with ’em, too, to do the interviewing and puff- 
ing. By jacks, it’s just the wrinkle to a dot ! ” 

Mr. Gaslucky was of the opinion that, like 
Napoleon, he was in the hands of irresistible 
destiny which would ensure the success of what- 
ever he might undertake ; still he was also a 
realist and depended largely upon tricks for his 
results. He had felt the great value of what 
he liked to term legitimate advertising, and he 
was fond of saying to himself that any scheme 
would succeed if properly set before the world. 
He regarded it a maxim that anything which 
can be clearly described is a fact. His realism was 
the gospel of success, he declared, and needed 
but to be stated to be adopted by all the world. 

From the first he saw how his hotel was to be 
an intellectual focus; moreover he designed to 
have it radiate its own glory like a star set upon 
Mt. Boab. 

The difficulties inherent in this project were 
from the first quite apparent to Mr. Gaslucky, 
but he was full of expedients and cunning. He 
had come out of the lowest stratum of life, fight- 


8 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

ing his way up to success, and his knowledge of 
human nature was accurate if not very broad. 

Early in the summer, about the first days of 
June, in fact, certain well-known and somewhat 
distinguished American authors received by 
due course of mail an autograph letter from 
Mr. Gaslucky, which was substantially as fol- 
lows: 


Cincinnati, 0., May 30, 1887. 

My dear Sir: 

The Hotel Helicon, situated on the Leuca- 
dian promontory, far up the height of Mt. Boab 
and overlooking the glorious valley of the Big 
Mash Kiver, amid tbe grandest scenery of the 
Cumberland Mountains, where at their southern 
extremity they break into awful peaks, chasms 
and escarpments, is now thrown open to a few 
favored guests for the summer. The proprietor 
in a spirit of liberality (and for the purpose of 
making this charming hotel known to a select 
public) is issuing a few special invitations to 
distinguished people to come and spend the 
summer free of charge. You are cordially and 
urgently invited. The Hotel Helicon is a place 
to delight the artist and the liiterateiir. It is 
high, airy, cool, surrounded by wild scenes, good 
shooting and fishing at hand, incomparable min- 
eral springs, baths, grottos, dark ravines and 
indeed everything engaging to the imagination. 
The proprietor will exhaust effort to make his 
chosen guests happy. The rooms are new, 
sweet, beautifully furnished and altogether com- 
fortable, and the table will have every delicacy 
of the season served in the best style. There 
will be no uninvited guests, all will be chosen 
from the most exalted class. Come, and for 


A Fortnight of Folly. c 

one season taste the sweets of the dews of Heli- 
con, without mone}^ and without price. 

If you accept this earnest and cordial invita- 
tion, notify me at once. Hotel Helicon is at 
your command. Truly yours, 

. Isaiah E. Gaslucky. 

It is needless to say that this letter was the 
product of a professional advertising agent 
employed for the occasion by the proprietor oi 
Hotel Helicon. The reader will observe the 
earmarks of the creation and readily recognize 
its source. Of course, when the letter was 
addressed to a woman there was a change, not 
only in the gender of the terms, but in the tone, 
which took on a more persuasive color. The 
attractions of the place were described in more 
poetic phrasing and a cunningly half-hidden 
thread of romance, about picturesque moun- 
taineers and retired and reformed bandits, was 
woven in. 

Naturally enough, each individual who re- 
ceived this rather uncommon letter, read it 
askance, at first, suspecting a trick, but the 
newspapers soon cleared the matter up by an- 
nouncing that Mr. Isaiah Gaslucky, of Cincin- 
nati, had ‘‘conceived the happy idea of making 
his new and picturesque Hotel Helicon free this 
season to a small and select company of distin- 
guished guests. The hotel will not be open to 
the public until next year.” 

And thus it came to pass that in midsummer 
such a company as never before was assembled, 
met on Mt. Boab and made the halls of Hotel 


lo A Fortnight of Folly. 

Helicon gay with their colors and noisy with 
their mirth. The woods, the dizzy cliffs, the bub- 
bling springs, the cool hollows, the windy peaks 
and the mossy nooks were filled with song, 
laughter, murmuring under-tones of sentiment, 
•or something a little sweeter and warmer, and 
there were literary conversations, and critical 
talks, and jolly satire bandied about, with some 
scraps of adventure and some bits of rather 
ludicrous mishap thrown in for variety. 

Over all hung a summer sky, for the most 
part cloudless, and the days were as sweet as 
the nights were delicious. 

II. 

In the afternoon of a breezy day, at the time 
when the shadows were taking full possession 
of the valley, the coach arrived at Hotel Heli- 
con from the little railway station at the foot of 
Mt. Boab. 

A man, the only passenger, alighted from his 
perch beside the driver and for a moment stood 
as if a little dazed by what he saw. 

He was very short, rather round and stout, 
and bore himself quietly, almost demurely. His 
head was large, his feet and hands were small 
and his face wore the expression of an habitual 
good humor amounting nearly to jolliness, 
albeit two vertical wrinkles between his brows 
hinted of a sturdy will seated behind a heavy 
Napoleonic forehead. The stubbly tufts of 
grizzled hair that formed his mustaches shaded 


A Fortnight of Folly. II 

a mouth, and chin at once strong and pleasing. 
He impressed the group of people on the hotel 
veranda most favorably, and at once a little 
buzz of inquiry circulated. No one knew 
him. 

That this was an important arrival could not 
be doubted ; it was felt at once and profoundly. 
Great men carry an air of individuality about 
with them ; each, like a planet, has his own 
peculiar atmosphere by which his light is mod- 
ified. There was no mistaking the light in this 
instance; it indicated a luminary of the first 
magnitude. 

Unfortunately the guests at Hotel Helicon 
were not required to record their names in a 
register, therefore the new comer could bide his 
own time to make himself known. 

Miss Alice Moyne, of Virginia, the beautiful 
young author of two or three picturesque short 
stories lately published in a popular magazine, 
was in conversation with Hartley Crane, the 
rising poet from Kentucky, just at the moment 
when this new arrival caused a flutter on the 
veranda. 

“ Oh, I do wonder if he can be Edgar He 
Yere?” she exclaimed. 

“ No,” said Hartley Crane, “ I have seen He 
Yere ; he is as large and as fascinating as his 
romances. That little pudgy individual could 
never make a great romantic fiction like Solway 
Moss., by De Yere.” 

“ But that is a superb head,” whispered Miss 
Moyne, “ the head of a master, a genius.” 


12 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

“Oh, there are heads and heads, genius 
and genius,” replied Crane. “ I guess the 
new-comer off as a newspaper man from Chi- 
cago or New York. It requires first-class gen- 
ius to be a good reporter.” 

The stranger under discussion was now giving 
some directions to a porter regarding his lug- 
gage. This he did with that peculiar readiness, 
or sleight, so to call it, which belongs to none but 
the veteran traveler. A moment later he came 
up the wooden steps of the hotel, cast a compre- 
hensive but apparently indifferent glance over 
the group of guests and passed into the hall, 
where they heard him say to the boy in wait- 
ing : “ My room is 24.” 

“ That is the reserved room,” remarked two 
or three persons at once. 

Great expectations hung about room 24 ; 
much guessing had been indulged in consider- 
ing who was to be the happy and exalted per- 
son chosen to occupy it. Now he had arrived, 
an utter stranger to them all. Everybody 
looked inquiry. 

“ Who can he be ? ” 

“ It must be Mark Twain,” suggested little 
Mrs. Philpot, of Memphis. 

“ Oh, no ; Mark Twain is tall, and very hand- 
some; I know Mark,” said Crane. 

“How strange !” ejaculated Miss Moyne, and 
when everybody laughed, she colored a little 
and added hastily : 

“I didn’t mean that it was strange that Mr. 
Crane should know Mr. Twain, but ” 


A Fortnight of Folly 1 3 

They drowned her voice with their laughter 
and hand-clapping. 

They were not always in this very light mood 
at Hotel Helicon, but just now they all felt in 
a trivial vein. It was as if the new guest had 
brought a breath of frivolous humor along with 
him and had blown it over them as he passed by. 

Boom 24 was the choice one of Hotel Heli- 
con. Every guest wanted it, on account of 
its convenience, its size and the superb view its 
windows afforded ; but from the first it had been 
reserved for this favored individual whose arri- 
val added greater mystery to the matter. 

As the sun disappeared behind the western 
mountains, and the great gulf of the valley 
became a sea of purplish gloom, conversation 
clung in half whispers to the subject who mean- 
time was arraying himself in evening dress for 
dinner, posing before the large mirror in room 
24 and smiling humorously at himself as one 
who, criticising his own foibles, still holds to- 
them with a fortitude almost Christian. 

He parted his hair in the middle, but the line 
of division was very slight, and he left a pretty, 
half-curled short wisp hanging over the centre 
of his forehead. The wide collar that hid his 
short neck creased his heavy well-turned jaws, 
giving to his chin the appearance of being 
propped up. Although he was quite stout, his 
head was so broad and his feet so small that he 
appeared to taper from top to toe in a way that 
emphasized very forcibly his expression of 
blended dignity and jollity, youth and middle 


14 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

age, sincerity and levity. When be bad finished 
bis toilet, be sat down by tbe best window in tbe 
best room of Hotel Helicon, and gazed out over 
tbe dusky valley to where a line of quivering 
silver light played fantastically along the line 
of peaks that notched tbe delicate blue of tbe 
•evening sky. Tbe breeze came in, cool and 
sweet, with a sort of champagne sparkle in its 
freshness and purity. It whetted his appetite 
and blew tbe dust of travel out of bis mind. 
He was glad when tbe dinner hour arrived. 

The long table was nearly full when be went 
down, and be was given a seat between MissMoyne 
and little Mrs. Philpot. By that secret cerebral 
trick we all know, but which none of us can ex- 
plain, be was aware that tbe company had just 
been discussing him. In fact, some one bad 
ventured to wonder if be were Mr. Howells, 
whereupon Mr. Crane bad promptly said that 
be knew Mr. Howells quite well, and that 
although in a general way tbe new-comer was 
not unlike tbe famous realist, be was far from 
identical with him. 

Laurens Peck, tbe busby-bearded Hew Eng- 
land critic, whispered in some one’s ear that it 
appeared as if Crane knew everybody, but that 
tbe poet’s lively imagination bad aided him 
more than bis eyes, in all probability. “Fact 
is,” said be, “ a Kentuckian soon gets so that 
be thinks be has been everywhere and seen 
everybody, whether be has or not.” 

Out of this remark grew a serious affair 


A Fortnight of Folly. 1 5 

wliich it will be my duty to record at the proper 
place. 

Little Mrs. Pbilpot, who wore gold eye-glasses 
and bad elongated dimples in her cbeeks and 
cbin, dexterously managed to have a word or 
two with tbe stranger, who smiled upon her 
graciously without attempting to enter into a 
conversation. Miss Moyne fared a little better, 
for she had the charm of grace and beauty to 
aid her, attended by one of those puffs of good 
luck which come to none but the young and the 
beautiful. Mr. R. Hobbs Lucas, a large and 
awkward historian from Hew York, knocked 
over a bottle of claret with his elbow, and the 
liquor shot with an enthusiastic sparkle diagon- 
ally across the table in order to fall on Miss 
Moyne’s lap. 

With that celerity which in very short and 
stout persons appears to be spontaneous, a sort 
of elastic quality, the gentleman from room 24 
interposed his suddenly outspread napkin. The 
historian flung himself across the board after 
the bottle, clawing rather wildly and upsetting 
things generally. It was but a momentary 
scene, such as children at school and guests at a 
summer hotel make more or less merry over, 
still it drew forth from the genial man of room 
24 a remark which slipped into Miss Moyne’s 
ear with tlie familiarity of well trained humor. 

“ A deluge of wine in a free hotel ! ” he ex- 
claimed, just above a whisper. “ Such generos- 
ity is nearly shocking.” 

“I am sorry you mention it,” said Miss 


j 6 A Fortnight of Folly. 

Moyne, with her brightest and calmest smile; 
“ I have been idealizing the place. A gush of 
grape-juice on Helicon is a picturesque thing to 
contemplate.” 

“But a lap-full of claret on Mt. Boab is not 
so fine, eh ? What a farce poetry is 1 What a 
humbug is romance 1 ” 

The historian had sunk back in his chair and 
was scowling at the purple stain which kept 
slowly spreading through the fiber of the cloth. 

“ I always do something,” he sighed, and his 
sincerity was obvious. 

“And always with aplomb f remarked little 
Mrs. Philpot. 

“ It would be a genius who could knock over 
a claret bottle with grace,” added Peck. “ How 
a jug of ale ” 

“ I was present at table once with Mr. Emer- 
son,” began the Kentucky poet, but nobody 
heard the rest. A waiter came with a heavy 
napkin to cover the stain, and as he bent over 
the table he forced the man from room'24 to 
incline very close to Miss Moyne. 

“To think of making an instance of Emer- 
son!” he murmured. “Emerson who died be- 
fore he discovered that men and women have 
to eat, or that wine will stain a new dress I ” 

“ But then he discovered so many things ” 

she began. 

“Please mention one of them,” he glibly in- 
terrupted. “What did Emerson ever discover? 
Hid he ever pen a single truth? ” 


A Fortnight of Folly. 


17 


“ Aloft in secret veins of air 
Blows the sweet breath of song,’ 

slie replied. “He trod the very headlands of 

truth. But you are not serious ” she checked 

herself, recollecting that she was speaking to a 
stranger. 

“Not serious but emphatically in earnest,” he 
went on, in the same genial tone with which he 
had begun. “There isn’t a thing but cunning 
phrase-form in anything the man ever wrote. 
He didn’t know how to represent life.” 

“ Oh, I see,” Miss Moyne ventured, “ you are 
a realist.” 

It is impossible to convey any adequate idea 
of the peculiar shade of contempt she conveyed' 
through the words. She lifted her head a little 
higher and her beauty rose apace. It was as if 
she had stamped her little foot and exclaimed : 

“ Of all things I detest realism — of all men, I hate 
realists.” 

“But I kept the wine off your dress!” he 
urged, as though he had heard her thought., 
“There’s nothing good but what is real. Eo- 
mance is lie-tissue. Keality is truth -tissue.” 

“Permit me to thank you for your good 
intentions,” she said, with a flash of irony ; 
“you held the napkin just in the right posi- 
tion, but the wine never fell from the table. 
Still your kindness lost nothing in quality 
because the danger was imaginary.” 

When dinner was over. Miss Moyne sought 
out Hartley Crane, the Kentucky poet who 
knew everybody, and suggested that perhaps 


1 8 A Fortnight of Folly. 

the stranger was Mr. Arthur Selby, ^he analyt- 
ical novelist whose name was on everybody’s 
tongue. 

“But Arthur Selby is thin and bald and has 
a receding chin. I met him often at tlie — 
I forget the club in New York,” said' Crane. 
“It’s more likely that he’s some reporter. He's 
a snob, anyway.” 

“Dear me, no, not a snob, Mr. Crane ; he is the 
most American man I ever met,” re[)lied Miss 
Moyne. 

“But Americans are the worst of all snobs,” 
he insisted, “especially literary Americans. 
They adore eveiything that’s foreign and pity 
everything that’s home-made.” 

As he said this he was remembering how 
Tennyson’s and Browning’s })oems were over- 
shadowing his own, even in Kentucky. From 
the ring of his voice Miss Moyne suspected 
something of this sort, and adroitly changed the 
subject. 


III. 

It might be imagined that a hotel full of 
authors would be sure to generate some flashes 
of disagreement, but, for a time at least, every- 
thing went on charmingly at Hotel Helicon. 
True enough, the name of the occupant of room 
24 remained a vexatious secret which kept 
growing more and more absorbing as certain 
very cunningly devised schemes for its exposure 
were easily thw^arted ; but even this gave the 


19 


A Fortnight of Folly, 

gentleman a most excellent excuse for nagging 
the ladies in regard to feminine curiosity and 
lack of generalship. Under the circumstances 
it was not to he expected that everybody 
should be strictly guarded in the phrasing of 
speech, still so genial and good-humored was 
the nameless man and so engaging was his way 
of evading or turning aside every thrust, that he 
steadily won favor. Little Mrs. Philpot, whose 
seven year old daughter (a bright and sweet 
little child) had become the pet of Hotel Heli- 
con, was enthusiastic in her pursuit of the 
stranger’s name, and at last she hit upon a plan 
that promised immediate success. She giggled 
all to herself, like a high-school girl, instead of 
like a widow of thirty, as she contemplated cer- 
tain victory. 

“How do you think you can remember,, 
dear?” she said to May, the child, after having 
explained over and over again what she wished 
her to do. 

“ Yeth,” said May, who lisped charmingly in 
the sweetest of child voices. 

“Well, what must you say?” 

“ I muth thay : Pleathe write your — ^your 

“Autograph.” 

“Yeth, your au — to — graph in my album.” 

“ That’s right, autograph, autograph, don’t 
forget. How let me hear you say it.” 

“ Pleathe write your autograph in my book.’^ 

Mrs. Philpot caught the child to her breast 
and kissed it vigorously, and not long afterward 
little May went forth to try the experiment. 


20 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

She was armed with her mother s autograpli 
album. When she approached her victim he 
thought he never had seen so lovely a child. 
The mother had not spared pains to give most 
efiect to the little thing’s delicate and appealing 
beauty by an artistic arrangement of the shining 
gold hair and by the simplest but cunningest 
tricks of color and drapery. 

With that bird-like shyness so winning in a 
really beautiful little girl, May walked up to 
the stranger and made a funny, hesitating 
courtesy. He looked at her askance, his smil- 
ing face shooting forth a ray of tenderness 
along with a gleam of shrewd suspicion, as he 
made out the album in her dimpled little 
hand. • 

“ Good morning, little one,” he said cheerily. 
“ Have you come to make a call ? ” 

He held out both hands and looked so kindly 
and good that she smiled until dimples just like 
her mother’s played over her cheeks and chin. 
Half sidewise she crept into his arms and held 
up the book. 

“Pleathe write your photograph in my 
book,” she murmured. 

He took her very gently on his knee, chuck- 
ling vigorously, his heavy jaws shaking and 
coloring. 

“ Who told you to come? ” be inquired, with 
a guilty cunning twinkle in his gray eyes. 

“ Mama told me,” was the prompt answer. 

Again the man chuckled, and, between the 
shame he felt for having betrayed the child and 


21 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

delight at the success of his perfidy, he grew 
quite red in the face. He took the autograph 
album and turned its stiff, ragged-edged leaves, 
glancing at the names. 

“ Ah, this is your mama’s book, is it ? ” he 
went on. 

“ Yeth it is,” said Ma3^ 

“ And I must write my name in it ? ” 

“ No, your — your ” 

“ Well what ? ” 

“ I don’t ’member.” 

He took from his pocket a stylographic pen 
and dashed a picturesque sign manual across a 
page. 

While the ink was drying he tenderly kissed 
the child’s forehead and then rested his chin on 
her bright hair. He could hear the clack of 
balls and mallets and the creak of a lazy swing 
down below on the so-called lawn, and a hum 
of voices arose from the veranda. He looked 
through the open window and saw, as in a 
dream, blue peaks set against a shining rim 
of sky with a wisp of vultures slowly wheeling 
about in a filmy, sheeny space. 

“ Mama said I muthn’t stay,” apologized the 
child, slipping down from his knee, which she 
had found uncomfortably short. 

He pulled himself together from a diffused 
state of re very and beamed upon her again with 
his cheerful smile. 

She turned near the door and dropped another 
comical little courtesy, bobbing her curly head 
till her hair twinkled like a tangle of starbeams 


22 A Fortnight of Folly. 

on a brook-ripple, then she darted away, book 
in hand. 

Little Mrs. Philpot snatched the album from 
May, as she ran to her, and greedily rustled the 
leaves in search of the new record, finding 
which she gazed at it while her face irradiated 
every shade of expression between sudden 
delight and utter perplexity. In fact she could 
not decipher the autograph, although the hand- 
writing surely was not bad. Loath as she 
naturally was to sharing her secret with her 
friends, curiosity at length prevailed and she 
sought help. Everybody in turn tried to make 
out the two short words, all in vain till Crane, 
by the poet’s subtle vision, cleared up the mys- 
tery, at least to his own satisfaction. 

“ Gaspard Dufour is the name,” he asserted, 
with considerable show of conscious superiority. 
“ A Canadian, I think. In fact I imperfectlj'- 
recall meeting him once at a dinner given by 
the Governor General to Lord Eosenthal at 
Quebec. He writes plays.” 

“Another romance out of the whole cloth hy 
the Bourbon aesthete ! ” whispered the critic. 
“ There’s no such a Canadian as Gaspard 
Dufour, and besides the man’s a Westerner 
rather over-Bostonized. I can tell by his voice 
and his mixed manners.” 

“ But Mrs. Hope would know him,” suggested 
the person addressed. “ She meets all the Hub 
literati j you know.” 

“ Literati ! ” snarled the critic, putting an 
end to further discussion. 


23 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

A few minutes later Mr. Gaspard Dufour 
came down and passed out of the hotel, taking 
his way into the nearest ravine. He wore a 
very short coat and a slouch hat. In his hand 
he carried a bundle of fishing-rod joints. A man 
of his build looks far from dignified in such 
dress, at best; but nothing could have accent- 
uated more sharply his absurd grotesqueness of 
appearance than the peculiar waddling gait he 
assumed as he descended the steep place and 
passed out of sight, a fish basket bobbing beside 
him and a red kerchief shining around his 
throat. 

Everybody looked at his neighbor and smiled 
inquisitively. Now that they had discovered 
his name, the question arose : What had Gaspard 
Dufour ever done that he should be accorded 
the place of honor in Hotel Helicon. No one 
(save Crane, in a shadowy way) had ever heard 
of him before. No doubt they all felt a little 
twinge of resentment ; but Dufour, disappearing 
down the ravine, had in some unaccountable 
way deepened his significance. 

lY. 

Everybody knows that a mountain hotel has 
no local color, no sympathy with its environ- 
ment, no gift of making its guests feel that they 
are anywhere in particular. It is all very 
delightful to be held aloft on the shoulder of a 
giant almost within reach of the sky ; but the 
charm of the thing is not referable to any 


24 ^ Fortnight of Folly. 

definite, visible cause, sucb as one readily bases 
one’s love of the sea-side on, or such as accounts 
for our delight in the life of a great city. No 
matter how fine the effect of clouds and peaks 
and sky and gorge, no matter how pure and 
exhilarating the air, or how blue the filmy deeps 
of distance, or how mossy the rocks, or how 
sweet the water, or how cool the wooded vales, 
the hotel stands there in an indefinite way, with 
no raison d'etre visible in its make-up, but with 
an obvious impudence gleaming from its win- 
dows, One cannot deport one’s self at such a 
place as if born there. The situation demands — 
nay, exacts behavior somewhat special and 
peculiar. No lonely island in the sea is quite 
as isolated and out of the world as the top of 
any mountain, nor can any amount of man’s 
effort soften in the least the savage individuality 
of mountain scenery so as to render those high 
places familiar or homelike or genuinely habita- 
ble. Delightful enough and fascinating enough 
all mountain hotels surely are ; but the sensa- 
tion that living in one of them induces is the 
romantic consciousness of being in a degree 
“out of space, out of time.” No doubt this 
feeling was heightened and intensified in the 
case of the guests at Hotel Helicon who were 
enjoying the added novelty of entire freedom 
from the petty economies that usually dog the 
footsteps and haunt very dreams of the 
average summer sojourner.. At all events, they 
were mostly a light-hearted set given over to a 


25 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

freedom of speech and action which would have 
horrified them on any lower plane. 

Scarcely had Gaspard Dufour passed beyond 
sight down the ravine in search of a trout-brook, 
than he became the subject of free discussion. 
Nothing strictly impolite was said about him ; 
but everybody in some way expressed amaze- 
ment at everybody’s ignorance of a man whose 
importance was apparent and whose name 
vaguely and tauntingly suggested to each one 
of them a half- recollect! on of having seen it in 
connection with some notable literary sensation. 

“ Is there a member of the French institute 
by the name of Dufour ? ” inquired E. Hobbs 
Lucas, the historian, thoughtfully knitting his 
heavy brows. 

“ I am sure not,” said Hartley Crane, “ for I 
met most of the members when I was last at 
Paris and I do not recall the name.” 

“ There goes that Bourbon again,” muttered 
Laurens Peck, the critic ; “ if one should mention 
Xenophon, that fellow would claim a personal 
acquaintance with him ! ” 

It was plain enough that Peck did not value 
Crane very highly, and Crane certainly treated 
Peck very coolly. Miss Moyne, however, was 
blissfully unaware that she was the cause of this 
trouble, and for that matter the men themselves 
would have denied with indignant fervor any 
thing of the kind. Both of them were stalwart 
and rather handsome, the Kentuckian dark and 
passionate looking, the New Yorker fair, cool 
and willful in appearance. Miss Moyne had 


26 A Fortnight of Folly. 

been- pleased with them both, without a special 
thought of either, whilst they were going rap- 
idly into the worry and rapture of love, with no 
care for anybody but her. 

She was beautiful and good, sweet- voiced, 
gentle, more inclined to listen than to talk, and 
fio she captivated everybody from the first. 

I think it would be quite interesting,” she 
said, “if it should turn out that Mr. Dufour is a 
genuine foreign author, like Tolstoi or Daudet 
or ” 

“Eealists, and nobody but^ realists,” interposed 
Mrs. Philpot ; “ why don’t you say Zola, and 
have done with it?” 

“ Well, Zola, then, if it must be,” Miss Moyne 
responded ; “ for, barring my American breeding 
and my Southern conservatism, I am nearly in 
sympathy with — no, not that exactly, but we 
are so timid. I should like to feel a change in 
the literary air.” 

“Oh, you talk just as Arthur Selby writes in 
his critical papers. He’s all the time trying to 
prove that fiction is truth and that truth is fic- 
tion. He lauds Zola’s and Dostoieffsky’s filthy 
novels to the skies ; but in his own novels he’s as 
prudish and Puritanish as if he had been born 
on Plymouth Eock instead of on an Illinois 
prairie.” 

“ I wonder why he is not a guest here,” some 
one remarked. “ I should have thought that 
our landlord would have had Mm at all haz- 
ards. Just now Selby is monopolizing the 


A Fortnight of Folly, tj 

field of American fiction. In fact I think he 
claims the earth.” 

“ It is so easy to assume,” said Guilford Fer- 
ris, whose romances always commanded eulogy 
from the press, but invariably fell dead on the 
market; “but I am told that Selby makes 
almost nothing from the sales of his books.” 

“ But the magazines pay him handsomely,” 
said Miss Moyne. 

“Yes, they do,” replied Ferris, pulling liis 
long brown mustache reflectively, “and I can’t 
see why. He really is not popular ; there is no 
enthusiasm for his fiction.” 

“ It’s a mere vogue, begotten by the critics,” 
said Hartley Crane. “ Criticism is at a very 
low ebb in America. Our critics are all either 
ignorant or given over to putting on English 
and French airs.” 

Ferris opened his eyes in a quiet way and 
glanced at Peck who, however, did not appear 
to notice the remark. 

“ There’s a set of them in Boston and Hew 
York,” Crane went on, “who watch the Revue 
de Deux Mondes and the London Atheneum^ 
ready to take the cue from them. Even Amer- 
ican books must stand or fall by the turn of 
the foreign thumb.” 

“ That is a very ancient grumble,” said Fer- 
ris, in a tone indicative of impartial indifference. 

“Take these crude, loose, awkward, almost 
obscene Eussian novels,” continued Crane, “ and 
see what a furor the critics of Hew York and 
Boston have fermented in their behalf, all 


28 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

because it chanced that a coterie of Parisian lit- 
erary roues fancied the filthy imaginings of Dos- 
toieffsky and the raw vulgarity of Tolstoi. 
What would they say of you, Ferris, if you 
should write so low and dirty a story as Crime 
and Its Punishment by Dostoieffsky ? ” 

“ Oh, I don’t ‘know, and, begging your grace, 
I don’t care a straw,” Ferris replied; “the pub- 
lishers would steal all my profits in any event.” 
“ Do you really believe that? ” inquired Peck. 
“ Believe it ? I know it,” said Ferris. “ When 
did you ever know of a publisher advertising a 
book as in its fiftieth thousand so long as the 
author had any royalty on the sales ? The only 
book of mine that ever had a run was one I 
sold outright in the manuscript to George Dun- 
kirk k Co., who publish all my works. That 
puerile efibrt is now in its ninetieth thousand, 
while the best of the other six has not yet shown 
up two thousand 1 Do you catch the point ? ” 

“ But what difference can printing a statement 
of the books sold make, anyway?” innocently 
inquired Miss Moyne 
Ferris laughed. 

“ All the difference in the world,” he said ; 
“the publisher would have to account to the 
author for all those thousands, don’t you see.” 

“ But they have to account, anyhow,” replied 
Miss Moyne, with a perplexed smile. * 

“Account ! ” exclaimed Ferris, contemptuously; 
“ account ! yes, they have to account.” 

“ But they account to me,” Miss Moyne gently 
insisted. 


29 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

“ Who are your publishers? ” he demanded. 

“George Dunkirk & Co.,” was the answer. 

“ Well,” said he, “ I’ll wager you anything I 
can come within twenty of guessing the sales up 
to date of your book. It has sold just eleven 
hundred and forty copies.” 

She laughed merrily and betrayed the danger* 
ous closeness of his guess by coloring a little. 

“ Oh, its invariably just eleven hundred and 
forty copies, no matter what kind of a book it 
is, or what publisher has it,” he continued ; “ I’ve 
investigated and have settled the matter.” 

The historian was suddenly thoughtful, little 
Mrs. Philpot appeared to be making some ab- 
struse calculation. Crane was silently gazing at 
the ground and Peck, with grim humor in his 
small eyes, remarked that eleven hundred and 
forty was a pretty high average upon the whole. 

Just at this point a figure appeared in the lit- 
tle roadway where it made its last turn lapsing 
from the wood toward the hotel. A rather tall, 
slender and angular young woman, bearing a 
red leather bag in one hand and a blue silk um- 
brella in the other, strode forward with the pace 
of a tragedienne. She wore a bright silk dress, 
leaf- green in color, and a black bonnet, of nearly 
the Salvation Army pattern, was set far back on 
her head, giving full play to a mass of short, 
fine, loosely tumbled yellow hair. 

She was very much out of breath from her 
walk up the mountain, but there was a plucky 
smile on her rather sallow face and an enterpris- 
ing gleam in her light eyes. 


30 A Fortnight of Folly. 

She walked right into the hotel, as if she had 
always lived there, and they heard ner talking 
volubly to the servant as she was following him 
to a room. 

Everybody felt a waft of free Western air and 
knew that Hotel Helicon had received another 
interesting guest, original if not typical, with 
qualities that soon must make themselves 
respected in a degree. 

“ Walked from the station ? ” Mrs. Philpot 
ventured, in querulous, though kindly interroga- 
tion. 

“ Up the mountain? ” Miss Moyne added, with 
a deprecatory inflection. 

“ And carried that bag ! ” exclaimed all the 
rest. 


V 

Gaspard Dufour, whose accumulations ot 
adipose tissue appeared to serve him a good 
turn, as he descended the steep, rocky ravine, 
hummed a droll tune which was broken at inter- 
vals by sundry mflssteps and down-sittings and 
side- wise bumps against the jutting crags. He 
perspired freely, mopping his brow meantime 
with a vast silk kerchief that hung loosely 
about his short neck. 

The wood grew denser as he descended and a 
damp, mouldy odor pervaded the spaces under- 
neath the commingling boughs of the oaks, 
pines, cedars, and sassafras. Here and there a 
lizard scampered around a tree -hole or darted 


31 


yl Fortnight of Folly. 

uii'^er tlie fallen leaves. Overhead certain 
shadowy flittiiigs betrayed the presence of an 
occasional small bird, demurely going about its 
business of food -getting. The main elements 
of the surroundings, however, were gloom and 
silence. The breeze-currents astir in the valley 
and rippling over the gray peaks of Mt. Boab 
could not enter the leafy chambers of this 
wooded gorge. Heat of a peculiarly sultry sort 
seemed to be stored here, for as Dufour pro- 
ceeded he began at length to gasp for breath, 
and it was with such relief as none but the suf- 
focating can fully appreciate, that he emerged 
into an open space surrounded, almost, with 
butting limestone cliffs, but cut across by a 
noisy little stream that went bubbling down 
into the valley through a cleft bedecked with 
ferns and sprinkled with perennial dew from a 
succession of gentle cascades. The ideal trout- 
brook was this, so far as appearances could go. 
At the foot of each tiny water-fall was a swirl- 
ing pool, semi-opaque, giving forth emerald 
flashes and silver glints, and bearing little cones 
of creamy foam round and round on its bosom. 
A thousand noises, every one a water-note, rising 
all along the line of the brook’s broken current, 
clashed together with an effect like that of hear- 
ing a far-off multitude applauding or some 
distant army rushing on a charge. 

So much out of breath and so deluged with 
perspiration was Dufour that he flung himself 
upon the ground beside the brook and lay 
there panting and mopping his face. Overhead 


32 A Fortnight of Folly. 

the bit of sky was like turquoise, below a slen- 
der glimpse of the valley shone between the 
rock walls, like a sketch subdued almost to 
monochrome of crepuscular purple. A fitful 
breath of cool air fell into the place, fanning 
the man’s almost purple cheeks and forehead, 
while a wood-thrush, whose liquid voice might 
have been regarded as part of the water-tumult, 
sang in a thorn tree hard by. 

In a half-reclining attitude, Dufour gave 
himself over to the delicious effect of all this, 
indulging at the same time in the impolite and 
ridiculous, but quite Shakespearian, habit of 
soliloquizing. 

“Jingo!” he remarked, “Jingo! but isn’t this 
a daisy prospect for trout! If those pools 
aren’t full of the beauties, then there's nothing 
in Waltonian lore and life isn’t worth living. 
Ha! Jingo! there went one clean above the 
water — a ten ouncer, at least!” 

He sprang at his rod as if to break it to pieces, 
and the facility with which he fitted the joints 
and the reel and run the line and tied the 
cast was really a wonder. 

“I knew they were here,” he muttered, “just 
as soon as I laid my eyes on the water. Who 
ever did see such another brook ! ” 

At the third cast of the fly, a brown hackle, 
by the way, up came a trout with a somersault 
and a misty gleam of royal purple and silver, 
attended by a spray of water and a short bub- 
bling sound. Dufour struck deftly, hooking the 
beautiful fish very insecurely through the edge 


33 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

of the lower lip. Immediately the reel began to 
sing and the rod to quiver, while Dnfour’s eyes 
glared almost savagely and his lips pursed with 
comical intensity. 

Eound and round flew the trout, now rushing 
to the bottom of the pool, now whisking under 
a projecting ledge and anon flinging itself clean ^ 
above the water and shaking itself convul- 
sivel3^ 

The angler was led hither and thither by his 
active prey, the exercise bedewing his face again 
with perspiration, whilst his feet felt the cool 
bath of water and the soothing embrace of 
tangled water-grass. The mere switch of a 
bamboo rod, bent almost into a loop, shook like 
a rush in a wind. 

Dufour was ill prepared to formulate a polite 
response when, at the height of his sport, a 
gentle but curiously earnest voice exclaimed : 

“Snatch hm out, snatch ’im out, dog gone 
yer clumsy hide I Snatch ’im out, er I’ll do it 
for ye!” 

The trout must have heard, for as the angler 
turned to get a hasty glance at the stranger, up 
it leaped and by a 'desperate shake broke the 
snell. 

“Confound you!” cried Dufour, his face red- 
der than ever. “ Confound your meddlesome 
tongue, why didn’t you keep still till I landed 
him?” 

There was a tableau set against the gray, 
lichen-bossed rocks. Two men glaring at each 
other. The new-comer was a tall, athletic, 


4 34 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

brown-faced mountaineer, bearing a gun and 
wearing two heavy revolvers. He towered 
above Dufour and gazed down upon him as if 
about to execute him. The latter did not quail, 
but grew angrier instead. 

“You ought to have better sense than to in- 
terfere with my sport in such a way ! Who are 
you, anyway? ” he cried in a hot, fierce tone. 

The mountaineer stood silent for a moment, 
as if collecting words enough for what he felt 
like saying, then : 

“ See yer,” he drawled, rather musically, “ ef 
I take ye by the scruff o’ yer neck an’ the heel 
o’ yer stockin’ an’ jest chuck ye inter thet pud- 
dle, ye’ll begin to surmise who I air, ye saucy 
little duck-legged minny-catcher, you ! ” 

Dufour, remembering his long training years 
ago at the Gentlemen’s Glove- Club, squared him- 
self with fists in position, having flung aside his 
tackle. In his righteous rage he forgot that his 
adversary was not only his superior in stature 
but also heavily armed. 

“Well, thet’ ther’ do beat me!” said the 
mountaineer, with an incredulous ring in his 
voice: “ The very idee 1 W’y ye little agger- 
vatin’ banty rooster, a puttin’ up yer props at 
me 1 W’y I’ll jest eternally and everlastin’ly 
wring yer neck an’ swob the face o’ nature wi’ 
ye 1 ” 

What followed was about as indescribable as a 
whirlwind in dry grass. The two men appeared 
to coalesce for a single wild, whirling, resound- 
ing instant, and then the mountaineer went 


A Fortnight of Folly. 35 

over headlong into the middle of the pool with a 
great plash and disappeared. Dufour, in a truly 
gladiatorial attitude, gazed fiercely at the large 
dimple in which his antagonist was buried for 
the instant, but out of which he presently pro- 
jected himself with great promptness, then, as a 
new thought came to him, he seized the fallen 
gun of the mountaineer, cocked it and leveled 
it upon its owner. There was a peculiar mean- 
ing in his words as he stormed out : 

“ Lie down ! down with you, or I blow a hole 
clean through you instantly ! ” 

Promptly enough the mountaineer lay down 
until the water rippled around his chin and 
floated his flaxen beard. Some moments of 
peculiar silence followed, broken only by the 
lapsing gurgle and murmur of the brook. 

Dufour, with arms as steady as iron bars, kept 
the heavy gun bearing on the gasping face of 
the unwilling bather, whilst at the same time 
he was dangerously fingering the trigger. The 
stout, short figure really had a muscular and 
doughty air and the heavy face certainly looked 
warlike. 

“ Stranger, a seein’ ’at ye’ve got the drap onto 
me, ’spose we swear off an’ make up friends ? ” 
The man in the water said this at length, in the 
tone of one presenting a suggestion of doubtful 
propriety. 

“ Don’t hardly think you’ve cooled off suffi- 
ciently, do you ? ” responded Dufour. 

“»This here’s spring warter, ye must ’mem- 
ber,” offered the mountaineer. 


36 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

The gun was beginning to tire Dufour’s arms. 

“Well, do you knock under?” he inquired, 
still carelessly fumbling the trigger. 

“Great mind ter say yes,” was the shivering 
response. 

“ Oh, take your time to consider, I’m in no 
hurry,” said Dufour. 

If the man in the water could have known 
how the supple but of late untrained arms of 
the^ man on shore were aching, the outcome 
might have been different; but the bath was 
horribly cold and the gun’s muzzle kept its 
bearing right on the bather’s eye. 

“I give in, ye’ve got me, stranger,” he at last 
exclaimed. 

Dufour was mightily relieved as he put down 
the gun and watched his dripping and shivering 
antagonist wade out of the cold pool. The men 
looked at each other curiously. 

“Ye’re the dog gone’dest man ’at ever I see,” 
remarked the mountaineer ; “ who air ye, any- 
how ? ” 

“ Oh, I’m a pretty good fellow, if you take 
me on the right tack,” said Dufour. 

The other hesitated a moment, and then 
inquired : 

“ Air ye one o’ them people up at the tavern 
on the mounting ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“ A boardin’ there ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“ For all summer ?” 

“ Possibly.” 


37 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

Again there was a silence, during which the 
water trickled off the mountaineer’s clothes and 
ran over the little stones at his feet. 

“Goin’ ter make fun o’ me when ye git up 
thar?” the catechism was at length resumed. 
Dufour laughed. 

“I could tell a pretty good thing on you,” 
he answered, taking a sweeping observation of 
the stalwart fellow’s appearance as he stood 
there with his loose jeans trousers and blue 
cotton shirt clinging to his shivering limbs. 

“ See yer, now,” said the latter, in a wheed- 
ling tone, and wringing his light, thin beard 
with one sinewy dark hand, “ see yer, now. I’d 
like for ve not ter do thet, stronger.” 

“ Why?” 

“Well,” said the mountaineer, after some 
picturesque hesitation and faltering, “ ’cause I 
hev a ’quaintance o’ mine \ip ther’ at thet 
tavern.” 

“ Indeed, have you? Who is it ? ” 

“ Mebbe ye mought be erquainted with Miss 
Sarah Anna Crabb ? ” 

“No.” 

“ Well, she’s up ther’, she stayed all night at 
our house las’ night an’ went on up ther’ this 
mornin’ ; she’s a literary woman an’ purty, an’ 
smart, an’ a mighty much of a talker.” 

“ Ugh ! ” 

“ Jest tell her ’at ye met me down yer, an’ 
’at I’m tol’ble well ; but don’t say nothin’ ’bout 
this ’ere duckin’ ’at ye gi’ me, will ye ? ” 

“ Oh, of course, that’s all right,” Dufour has- 


38 A Fortnight of Folly, 

tened to saj, feeling an indescribable thrill of 
sympathy for the man. 

“Yer’s my hand, strenger, an’ w’en Wesley 
Tolliver gives a feller his hand hit means all 
there air ter mean,” exclaimed the latter, as 
warmly as his condition would permit, “an’ 
w’en ye need er friend in these parts jest come 
ter me.” 

He shouldered his gun, thereupon, and 
remarking that he might as well be going, 
strode away over a spur of the mountain, his 
clothes still dripping and sticking close to his 
muscular limbs. Dufour found his rod broken 
and his reel injured, by having felt the weight 
of W esley Tolliver’s foot, and so he too turned 
to retrace his steps. 

Such an adventure could not fail to gain in 
spectacular grotesqueness as it took its place in 
the memory and imagination of Dufour. He 
had been in the habit of seeing such things on 
the stage and of condemning them out of hand 
as the baldest melodramatic nonsense, so that 
now he could not fairly realize the matter as 
something that had taken place in his life. 

He was very tired and hungry when he 
reached Hotel Helicon. 

VI. 

“ Oh, yes, I walked all the way up the moun- 
tain from the railroad depot,” explained the 
young woman whose arrival we chronicled in 
another chapter, “ but I stopped over night at a 
cabin on the way and discovered some just 


39 


4 Fortnight of Folly. 

delightful characters — the Tollivers — regular 
Craddock sort of people, an old lady and her 
son.” 

By some method known only to herself she 
had put herself upon a speaking-plane with 
Dufour, who, as she approached him, was stand- 
ing in an angle of the wide wooden veranda 
waiting for the moon to rise over the distant 
peaks of the eastern rcwDuntains. 

“I saw Mr. Tolliver to-day while whip- 
ping a brook down here,” said he, turning to 
look her squarely in the face. 

“ Oh, did you ! Isn’t he a virile, villainous, 
noble, and altogether melodramatic looking 
man? I wish there was some one here who 
could sketch him for me. But, say, Mr. 
Dufour, what do you mean, please, when you 
speak of whipping a brook ? ” 

She took from her pocket a little red note- 
book and a pencil as he promptly responded : 
“Whipping a brook? oh, that’s angler’s non- 
sense, it means casting the line into the water, 
you know.” 

“That’s funny,” she remarked, making a 
note. 

She was taller than Dufour, and so slender 
and angular that in comparison with his exces- 
sive plumpness she looked gaunt and bony. In 
speaking her lips made all sorts of wild contor- 
tions showing her uneven teeth to great effect, 
and the extreme rapidity of her utterance gave 
an explosive emphasis to her voice. Over her 
forehead, which projected, a fluffy mass of pale 


40 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

yellow hair sprang almost fiercely as if to 
attack her scared and receding chin, 

“ You are from Michigan, I believe, Miss 
Crabb,” remarked Dufour. 

“ Oh, dear, no 1 ” she answered, growing red 
in the face, “ No, indeed. I am from Indiana, 
from Eingville, associate editor of the Btarf 

“ Pardon, I meant Indiana. Of course I knew 
you were not from Michigan.” 

“ Thanks,” with a little laugh and a shrug, 
“ I am glad you see the point.” 

“ I usually do — a little late,” he remarked 
complacently. 

“You are from Boston, then, I infer,” she 
glibly responded. 

“ Not precisely,” he said, with an approving 
laugh, “ but I admit that I have some Bostonian 
qualities.” 

At this point in the conversation she was 
drooping over him, so to say, and he was 
sturdily looking up into her bright, insistent 
face. 

“ What a group ! ” said Crane to Mrs. Bridges, 
a New York fashion editor. “ I’d give the 
best farm in Kentucky (so far as my title goes) 
for a photograph of it ! Doesn’t she appear to 
be just about to peck out his eyes 1 ” 

“ Your lofty imagination plays you fantastic 
tricks,” said Mrs. Bridges. “ Is she the famous 
Western My reporter?” • 

“ The same, of the Ringville Star. I met her 
at the Cincinnati convention. It was there 


41 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

that Bascom of the Bugle called her a bag of 
gimlets, because she bored him so.” 

“ Oh ! ” 

This exclamation was not in response to what 
Crane had said, but it was an involuntary tribute 
to the moon-flower just flaring into bloom 
between twin peaks lying dusky and heavy 
against the mist of silver and gold that veiled 
the sweet sky beyond. A semi -circle of pale 
straw-colored fire gleamed in the lowest angle 
of the notch and sent up long, wavering lines of 
light almost to the zenith, paling the strongest 
stars and intensifying the shadows in the moun- 
tain gorges and valleys. Grim as angry gods, 
the pines stood along the slopes, as if gloomily 
contemplating some dark scheme of vengeance. 

“ A real Sapphic,” said Crane, dropping into 
a poetical tone, as an elocutionist does when he 
is hungry for an opportunity to recite a favorite 
sketch. 

“Why a Sapphic?” inquired the matter-of- 
fact fashion-editor. 

“Oh, don’t you remember that fragment, that 
glorious picture Sappho’s divine genius has 
made for us — ” 

He quoted some Greek. 

“ About as divine as Choctaw or Kickapoo,” 
she said. “ I understand the moon-shine better. 
In fact I have a sincere contempt for all this 
transparent clap-trap you poets and critics 
indulge in when you got upon your Greek hobby. 
Divine Sappho, indeed ! A lot of bald bits of 


42 A Fortnight of Folly, 

jargon made famous by the comments of fogies. 
Let’s look at the moon, please, and be sincere.” 

“ Sincere I ” 

“ Yes, you know very well that if you had 
written the Sapphic fragments the critics 
would — ” 

“ The critics ! What of them ? They are a 
set of disappointed poetasters themselves. Blind 
with rage at their own failures, they snap right 
and left without rhyme or reason. Now there’s 
Peck, a regular — ” 

“Well, sir, a regular whatf''^ very coolly 
demanded the critic who had stepped forth from 
a shadowy angle and now stood facing Crane. 

“ A regular star-gazer,” said Mrs. Bridges 
“ Tell us why the planets yonder ^,11 look so 
ghastly through the shimmering moonlight.” 

Peck without reply turned and walked away. 

“ Is he offended ? ” she asked. 

“No, he gives offence, but can not take it.” 

Mrs. Bridges grevr silent. 

“We were speaking of Sappho,” observed 
Crane, again gliding into an elocutionary mood. 
“I have translated the fragment that I repeated 
a while ago. Let me give it to you. 

* When on the dusky, violet sky 
The full flower of the moon blooms high 
The stars turns pale and die ! ’ ” 

Just then Miss Moyne, dressed all in white, 
floated by on Peck’s arm, uttering a silvery 
gust of laughter in response to a cynical obser- 
vation of the critic. 


43 


A Fortnight of Folly, 

“ What a lovely girl she is,” said Mrs. 
Bridges. Mr. Peck shows fine critical acumen 
in being very fond of her.” 

Crane was desperately silent. “ He’s a hand- 
some man, too, and I suspect it’s a genuine love 
affair,” Mrs. Bridges went on, fanning herself 
complacently. Back and forth, walking slowly 
and conversing in a soft minor key, save when 
now and then Miss Moyne laughed melodiously, 
the promenaders passed and repassed. Peck 
never deigning to glance toward Crane, who had 
forgotten both Sappho and the moon. Miss 
Moyne did, however, once or twice turn her eyes 
upon the silent poet. 

“ Oh,” went on Miss Crabb, filling Dufour’s 
ears with the hurried din of her words, Oh, 
I’m going to write a novel about this place. I 
never saw a better chance for local color, real 
transcripts from life, original scenes and genuine 
romance all tumbled together. Don’t you think 
I might do it ? ” 

“ It does appear tempting,” said Dufour. 
“ There’s Tolliver for instance, a genuine Chil- 
howee moonshiner.” He appeared to laugh 
inwardly as he spoke. Indeed he heard the 
plash of water and the dripping, shivering 
mountaineer stood forth in his memory down 
there in the gorge. 

“ A moonshiner ! ” gasped Miss Crabb, flut- 
tering the leaves of her note-book and writ- 
ing by moonlight with a celerity that amazed 
Dufour. 


44 A Fortnight of Folly. 

“Potentially, at least,” lie replied evasively. 
“ He looks like one and he don’t like water.” 

“If he does turn out to be a real moonshiner,” 
Miss Crabb proceeded reflectively to say, “it 
will be just too delicious for anything. I don’t 
mind telling you, confidentially, Mr. Dufour, 
that I am to write some letters while here to the 
Chicago Daily Lightning Express. So I’d take 
it as a great favor if you’d give me all the points 
you get.” 

“ That’s interesting,” he said, with a keen 
scrutiny of her face for a second. “ I shall be 
glad to be of assistance to you.” 

He made a movement to go, but lingered to 
say : “ Pray give me all the points, too, will 

you?” 

“ Oh, are you a journalist too ? ” sbe inquired, 
breathlessly hanging over him. “What pa- 
per — ” 

“I’m not much of anything,” he hurriedly 
interposed, “ but I like to know what is going 
on, that’s all.” 

He walked away without further excuse and 
went up to his room. 

“ I’ve got to watch him,” soliloquized Miss 
Crabb, “ or he’ll get the scoop of all the news. 
Give him points, indeed I Maybe so, but not 
till after I’ve sent them to the Lightning Ex- 
press ! I’ll keep even with him, or know the 
reason why.” 

It was a grand panorama that the climbing 
moon lighted up all around Mount Boab, a vast 
billowy sea of gloom and sheen. Here were 


45 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

shining cliffs, there dusky gulches; yonder the 
pines glittered like steel-armed sentinels on the 
hill-tops, whilst lower down they appeared to 
skulk like cloaked assassins. Shadows came 
and went, now hroad- winged and wavering, 
again slender and swift as the arrows of death. 
The hotel was bright within and without. 
Some one was at the grand piano in the hall 
making rich music — a fragment from Beetho- 
ven, — and a great horned owl down the ravine 
was booming an effective counterpoint. 

Crane stood leaning on the railing of the veranda 
and scowling savagely as Peck and Miss Moyne 
continued to promenade and converse. He was, 
without doubt, considering sinister things. Mrs. 
Bridges, finding him entirely unsympathetic, 
went to join Miss Crabb, who was alone where 
she had been left by Dufour. Meantime, up in 
his room, with his chair tilted far back and his 
feet thrust out over the sill of an open window, 
Dufour was smoking a fragrant Cuban cigar, 
(fifty cents at retail) and alternating smiles with 
frowns as he contemplated his surroundings. 

“ Authors,” he thought, “ are the silliest, the 
vainest, and the most impractical lot of human 
geese that ever were plucked for their valuable 
feathers. And newspaper people I Humph!” 
He chuckled till his chin shook upon his im- 
maculate collar. “ Just the idea, now, of that, 
young woman asking me to furnish her with 
points I ” 

There was something almost jocund blent 
with his air of solid self-possession, and he 


46 A Fortnight of Folly. 

smoked the precious cigars one after another 
with prodigal indifference and yet with the per- 
fect grace of him to the manner born. 

“ Hotel Helicon on Mt. Boab ! ” ho repeated, 
and then betook himself to bed. 

YII. 

Some people are born to find thiyigi out — to 
overhear, to reach a place just at the moment ir^ 
which an event comes to pass there — ^born 
indeed, with the news-gatherer’s instinct per 
fectly developed. Miss Crabb was one of these 
How she chanced to over-hear some low-spokeu 
bat deadly sounding words that passed between 
Peck and Crane, it would be hard to say; still 
she overheard them, and her heart jumped 
almost into her mouth. It was a thrillingly 
dramatic passage, there under the heavy-topped 
oak by the west veranda in the gloom. 

Villain ! ” exclaimed Crane, in the hissing 
voice of a young tragedy- player at rehearsal. 
Villain I you shall not escape me. Defend 
yourself I” 

“ Nonsense,” said Peck, “you talk like a fool. 
I don’t want to fight ! What’s that you’ve got 
in your hand ? ” 

“ A sword, you cowardly craven ! ” 

“ You call me a coward ! If I had a good 
club I should soon show you what I could do, 
you sneaking assassin ! ” 

More words and just as bitter followed, till at 
last a fight was agreed upon to take place im- 
mediately, at a certain point on the verge of a 


A Fortnight of Folly. 47 

cliff not far away. There were to be no seconds 
and the meeting was to end in the death of one 
or both of the combatants. 

To Miss Crabb all this had a sound and an 
appearance as weird as anything in the wildest 
romance she ever had read. It was near mid- 
night; the hotel was quite soundless and the 
moon on high made the shadows short and 
black. 

“ Meet me promptly at the Eagle’s ISTest in 
ten minutes,” said Crane, “ I’ll fetch my other 
sword and give you choice.” 

“All right, sir,” responded Peck, “but a club 
would do.” 

The peculiar hollowness of their voices 
affected the listener as if the sounds had come 
from a tomb. She felt clammy. Doubtless 
there is a considerable element of humorous, 
almost ludicrous bravado in such a scene when 
coolly viewed; but Miss Crabb could not take 
a calm, critical attitude just then. At first she 
was impelled almost irresistibly toward inter- 
fering and preventing a bloody encounter; but 
her professional ambition swept the feeling 
aside. Still, being a woman, she was dreadfully 
nervous. “Ugh!” she shuddered, “it will be 
just awful, but I can’t afford to miss getting the 
full particulars for the Lightning Express. A 
sure enough duel! It will make my fortune! 
Oh, if I were a man, now, just only for a few 
hours, what a comfort it would be ! But all the 
same I must follow them — I must see the en- 


48 A Fortnight of Folly, 

counter, describe it as an eye-witness ana send 
it by wire early in the morning.” 

It occurred to her mind just then that the 
nearest telegraph station was twelve miles down 
the mountain, but she did not flinch or waver. 
The thought that she was required to do what 
a man might well have shrunk from gave an 
element of heroism to her pluck. She was con- 
scious of this and went about her task with an 
elasticity and facility truly admirable. 

Eagle’s ISTest was the name of a small area on 
the top of a beetling cliff whose almost per- 
pendicular wall was dotted with clumps of 
sturdy little cedar trees growing out of the 
chinks. It was a dizzy place at all times, but 
by night the effect of its airy height was very 
trying on any but the best nerves. Crane and 
Peck both were men of fine physique and were 
possessed of stubborn courage and great com- 
'bativeness. They met on the spot and after 
choosing swords, coolly and promptly proceeded 
to the fight. On one hand, close to the cliff’s 
edge, was a thick mass of small oak bushe?, on 
the other hand lay a broken wall of fragmentary 
stones. The footing-space was fairly good, 
though a few angular blocks of stone lay here 
and there, and some brushes of stiff wood-grass 
were scattered around. 

Crane led with more caution than one would 
have expected of an irate Kentuckian, and Peck 
responded with the brilliant aplomb of an 
enthusiastic duelist. 

The swords were neither rapiers nor broad- 


49 


// 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

swords, being the ordinary dress-weapons worn 
by Confederate Infantry officers in the war 
time — weapons with a history, since they had 
been at the thigh of father and son, the bravest 
of Kentucky Cranes, through many a stormy 
battle. 

Peck’s back was toward the precipice-brink 
at the commencement of the engagement, but 
neither had much the advantage, as the moon 
was almost directly overhead. As their weap- 
ons began to flash and clink, the slender keen 
echoes fell over into the yawning chasm and 
went rattling down the steep, ragged face of the 
precipice. They were vigorous and rather good 
fencers and it would have been evident to an on- 
looker of experience that the fight was to be a 
long one, notwithstanding the great weight of 
the swords they were using. They soon began 
to fight fiercely and grew more vehemently 
aggressive each second, their blows and thrusts 
and parries and counter-cuts following each 
other faster and faster until the sounds ran to- 
gether and the sparks leaped and shone even in 
the bright moonlight. They mingled broad- 
sword exercise with legitimate rapier fencing 
and leaped about each other like boxers, their 
weapons whirling, darting, rising, falling, whilst 
their breathing became loud and heavy. It 
was a scene to have stirred the blood of men 
and women four hundred years ago, when love 
was worth fighting for and when men were quite 
able and willing to fight for it. 

The combatants strained every point of their 
4 


50 A Fortnight of Folly, 

strength and skill, and not a drop of blood could 
either draw. Slash, thrust, whack, clink, clank, 
clack, click, cling! Eound and round they 
labored, the fury of their efforts flaming out of 
their eyes and concentrating in the deep lines of 
their m.ouths. As if to listen, the breeze lay 
still in the trees and the great owl quit hooting 
in the ravine. Faster and faster fell the blows, 
swifter and keener leaped the thrusts, quicker 
and surer the parries were interposed. The 
swords were hacked and notched like hand-saws, 
the blades shook and hummed like lyre-cords. 
Now close to the cliff’s edge, now over by the 
heap of broken stones and the.n close beside the 
clump of oak bushes, the men, panting and 
sweating, their muscles knotted, their sinews 
leaping like bow-strings, their eyes standing out, 
as if starting from their sockets, pursued each 
other without a second’s rest or wavering. 

At last, with an irresistible spurt of fury. 
Crane drove Peck right into the bushes with a 
great crash and would not let him out. The 
critic was not vanquished, however, for, despite 
the foliage and twigs, he continued to parry and 
thrust with dangerous accuracy and force. 

Just at this point a strange thing happened. 
Eight behind Peck there was a tearing, crashing 
sound and a cry, loud, keen, despairing, terrible, 
followed immediately by the noise of a body 
descending among the cedars growing along the 
face of the awful precipice. 

It was a woman’s voice, shrieking in deadly 


51 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

horror that then came up out of the dizzy depth 
of space below ! 

The men let fall their swords and leaped ta 
the edge of the cliff with the common thought 
that it was Miss Moyne who had fallen over. 
They reeled back giddy and sick, staggering as, 
if drunken. 

Far down they had seen something white 
fluttering and gleaming amid a tuft of cedars 
and a quavering voice had cried : 

“ Help, help, oh, help ! ” 

And so the duel was at an end. 

Vlll. 

Hotel Helicon was shaken out of its sleep by 
the startling rumor to the effect that Miss Moyne 
had fallen down the precipice at Eagle’s Nest. 

Of all the rudely awakened and mightily 
frightened inmates, perhaps Miss Moyne herself 
was most excited by this waft of bad news. She 
had been sleeping very soundly in dreamless 
security and did not at first feel the absurdity 
of being told that she had just tumbled down 
the escarpment, which in fact she never yet had 
summoned the courage to approach, even when 
sustained by a strong masculine arm. 

“ O dear ! how did it happen? ” she demanded 
of her aunt, Mrs. Coleman Ehodes, who had 
rushed upon her dainty couch with the frightful 
announcement of her accident. 

“Oh, Alice! you are here, you are not hurt 
at all! Oh ! ” Mrs. Khodes went on, “and what 
can it all mean ! ” 


52 


A Fortnight of Folly, 

Everybody rushed out, of course, as soon as 
hurried dressing would permit, and fell into the 
confusion that filled the halls and main veranda. 

Crane was talking in a loud, but well modu- 
lated strain, explaining the accident : 

“Mr. Peck and I,” he went on to say, “were 
enjoying a friendly turn at sword-play up here 
at Eagle’s Nest ; couldn’t sleep, needed exercise, 
and went up there so as not to disturb any one. 
While we were fencing she came rushing past 
through those bushes and leaped right over with 
a great shriek. She — ” 

“Don’t stop to talk,” cried Mr. E. Hobbs 
Lucas, with a directness and clearness quite 
unusual in a historian. “Don’t stop to talk, 
let’s go do something ! ” 

“Yes, come on,” quavered poor Peck, his face 
whiter than the moon and his beard quivering 
in sympathy with his voice. 

“ Oh, it’s dreadful, awful I” moaned little Mrs. 
Philpot, “ poor, dear Miss Moyne, to think that 
she is gone 1 ” and she leaned heavily on Miss 
Moyne’s shoulder as she spoke. 

It was a strange scene, too confused for the 
best dramatic effect, but spectacular in the ex- 
treme. Servants swarmed out with lights that 
wavered fantastically in the moonshine, while 
the huddled guests swayed to and fro in a body. 
Every face was pinched with intense excitement 
and looked haggard under its crown of dishev- 
eled hair. Even the hotel windows stared in 
stupid horror, and the kindly countenances of the 
negro waiters took on a bewildered and mean- 


A Fortnight of Folly. 53 

ingless grin set in a black scowl of superstition 
and terror. 

When Dufour came upon the scene, he did 
not appear in the least flurried, and the first 
thing he did was to lay his hand on Miss 
Moyne’s shoulder and exclaim in a clear tenor 
strain : 

“Why, here! it’s all a mistake! What are 
you talking about? Here’s Miss Moyne! Here 
she stands ! ” 

“Mercy! where?” enquired little Mrs. Phil- 
pot, who was still leaning on her friend and 
shedding bitter tears. 

Dufour, with a quiet : “Please don’t take 
offence,” put a hand on either side of Miss 
Moyne and lifted her so that she stood in a 
chair looking very sweetly down over the crowd 
of people. 

Few indeed are they who can look beautiful 
under such circumstances, but Miss Moyne cer- 
tainly did, especially in the eyes of Crane and 
Peck as they gazed up at her. 

Forthwith the tragedy became a farce. 

“That Kentuckian must romance, I suppose,” 
grumbled. R. Hobbs Lucas. “ Wonder what 
he’ll tell next.” 

“ I don’t see how I could be so mistaken,” 
said Peck, after quiet had been somewhat re- 
stored, “I would have willingly been sworn 
to—” 

He was interrupted by a dozen voices hurling 
ironical phrases at him. 

“It is every word truth,” exclaimed Crane 


54 A Fortnight of Folly. 

testily. “ Do you suppose I would trifle with 
so — ” 

“ Oh, don’t you absolutely know that we sup- 
pose just that very thing ? ” said Lucas. 

With the return of self-consciousness the com- 
pany began to scatter, the ladies especially 
scampering to their rooms with rustling celerity. 
The men grumbled not a little, as if being 
deprived of a shocking accident touched them 
with a sting. 

“The grotesque idea!” ejaculated Dufour. 
“Such a practical joke — impractical joke, I 
might better say, could originate only between a 
poet and a critic.” 

Everybody went back to bed, feeling more or 
less injured by Crane and Peck, who shared in 
their own breasts the common impression that 
they had made great fools of themselves. If 
these crest-fallen knights, so lately militant and 
self-confident, had any cause of quarrel now it 
was based upon a question as to which should 
feel the meaner and which should more deeply 
dread to meet Miss Moyne on the morrow. 

As for Miss Moyne herself she was indig- 
nant although she tried to quiet her aunt, who 
was ready to shake the dust of Mt. Boab fl-om 
her feet at once. 

Next morning, however, when it was discov- 
ered that Miss Crabb was missing and that after 
all something tragic probably had happened, 
everybody felt relieved. 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

IX 


55 


Mr. Wesley Tolliver might well have served 
the turn of romancer or realist, as he stood in 
the shadow of a cedar-clump with the myster- 
ious stillness of midnight all around him. He 
was a very real and substantial looking person- 
age, and yet his gun, his pistols, his fantastic 
mountain garb and the wild setting in which be 
was framed gave him the appearance of a strong 
sketch meant to illustrate a story by Craddock. 
Above him towered the cliff at Eagle’s Xest and 
near by was the mountain “Pocket” in which 
nestled the little distillery whose lurking-place 
had long been the elusive dream of utopian 
revenue officers. In a space of brilliant moon- 
light, Tolliver’s dog, a gaunt, brindle cur, sat in 
statuesque worthlessness, remembering no doubt 
the hares he never had caught and the meatless 
bones he had vainly buried during a long igno- 
ble life. 

The hotel and its inmates had rendered the 
distillery and its furtive operatives very uneasy 
of late, and now as Tolliver in his due turn 
stood guard by night he considered the proba- 
bility of having to look for some better situation 
for his obscure manufactory with a species of 
sadness which it would be impossible to describe. 
He thought with deep bitterness of all the 
annoyance he had suffered at the hands of med- 
dling government agents and from the outside 
world in general and he tried to understand 
how any person could pretend to see justice in 


56 /I Fortnight of Folly. 

such persecution. What had he done to meri^* 
being hunted like a wild beast? Nothing but 
buy his neighbor's apples at the fair price of 
twenty cents a bushel and distil them into 
apple brandy! Could this possibly be any 
injury to any government official, or to anybody 
else? He paid for his still, he paid for the 
apples, he paid fair wages to the men who 
worked for him, what more could be justly 
demanded of him ? 

It was while he was wholly absorbed in try- 
ing tc solve this knotty problem that far above 
a strange cliiik and clatter began, which sounded 
to him as if it were falling from among the 
stars. Nothing within his knowledge or exper- 
ience suggested an explanation of such a phe- 
nomenon. He felt a thrill of superstitious terror 
creep through his iron nerves as the aerial 
racket increased and seemed to whisk itself 
from place to place with lightning celerity. An 
eccentric echo due to the *angles and projections 
of the cliff added weird effect to the sounds. 

The dog uttered a low plaintive whine and 
crept close to his master, and even wedged him- 
self with tremulous desperation between the 
knees of that wondering and startled sentinel. 

Tlie clinking and clanging soon became loud 
and continuous, falling in a cataract down the 
escarpment, accompanied now and again by 
small fragments of stone and soil. 

At last Tolliver got control of himself suffi- 
ciently, and looked out from his shadowy station 


A Fortnight of Folly. 57 

anb up towards tbe dizzy crown of Eagle’s 
Nest. 

Just at that moment there was a crash and a 
scream. He saw a wide- winged, ghostly object 
come over the edge and swoop down. Another 
scream, another and another, a tearing sound, a 
crushing of cedar boughs, a shower of small 
stones and lumps of soil. 

Tolliver, frightened as he never before had ’ 
been, turned and fled, followed by his ecstatic 
dog. 

A voice, keen, clear, high, beseeching pur- 
sued him and reached his ears. 

“Help! help! Oh, help!” 

Surely this was the “ Harnt that walks Mt. 
Boab! ” This syren of the mountains had lured 
many a hunter to his doom. 

“Oh, me! Oh, my! Oh, mercy on me! 
Help! help!” 

Tolliver ran all the faster, as the voice seemed 
to follow him, turn as he would. He bruised 
his shins on angular rocks, he ran against trees, 
he fell over logs, and at last found himself hope- 
lessly entangled in a net of wild grape-vines, 
with his enthusiastic dog still faithfully wrig- 
gling between his knees. 

The plaintive voice of the syren, now greatly 
modified by distance, assailed his ears with 
piteous persistence, as he vainly struggled to 
free himself. The spot was dark as Erebus, 
being in the bottom of a ravine, and the more 
he exerted himself the worse off he became. 

It was his turn to call for help, but if any of 


5 ^ A Fortnight of Folly. 

his friends heard they did not heed his suppli- 
cations, thinking them but baleful echoes of the 
Harnt’s deceitful voice. 

It was at the gray of dawn when at last Tol- 
liver got clear of the vines and made his way 
out of the ravine. By this time he had entirely 
overcome his fright, and with that stubbornness 
.characteristic of all mountain men, he betook 
himself back to the exact spot whence he had 
so precipitately retreated. His dog, forlornly 
nonchalant, trotted behind him to the place and 
resumed the seat from which the Harnt had 
driven him a few hours ago. In this attitude, 
the animal drooped his nose and indifferently 
sniffed a curious object lying near. 

“What’s thet ther’ thing, Mose? inquired 
Tolliver, addressing the dog. 

“ Well I’ll ber dorg-goned 1 ” he added, as he 
picked up a woman’s bonnet. “ If this here 
don’t beat the work an’ all camp meetin’ ! Hit 
air — well, I’ll ber dorged — hit air — I’m er ghost 
if hit aint Miss Sara’ Anna Crabb’s bonnet, by 
Hed!” 

He held it up by one silk string and gazed at 
it with a ludicrously puzzled stare. The dog 
whined and wagged his tail in humble sym- 
pathy with his master’s bewilderment. 

“Hit’s kinder interestin’, haint it, Mose?” 
Tolliver went on dryly. “ We’ll hev ter look 
inter this here thing, won’t we, Mose? ” 

As for Mose, he was looking into it with all 
his eyes. Indeed he was beginning to show 


59 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

extreme interest, and his tail was pounding the 
ground with great rapidity. 

Suddenly a thought leaped into Tolliver’s 
brain and with a start he glanced up the escarp- 
ment, his mouth open and his brown cheeks 
betraying strong emotion. Mose followed his 
master’s movements with kindling eyes, and 
whined dolefully, his wolfish nose lifted almost 
vertically. 

“ Is that you, Mr. Tolliver ? ” fell a voice 
out of a cedar clump a little way up the side 
of the cliff. 

“ Hit air me,” he responded, as he saw Miss 
Crabb perched among the thick branches. She 
had her little red note-book open and was 
writing vigorously. Her yellow hair was di- 
sheveled so that it appeared to surround her 
face with a flickering light which to Tolliver’s 
mind gave it a most beautiful and altogether 
lovely expression. 

“ Well, I’ll her — ” he checked himself and 
stood in picturesque suspense. 

“ How, Mr. Tolliver, won’t you please help 
me down from here?” she demanded, closing 
her note-book and placing her pencil behind 
her ear. “ I’m awfully cramped, sitting in this 
position so long.” 

The chivalrous mountaineer did not wait to 
be appealed to a second time, but laying down 
his gun to which he had clung throughout the 
night, he clambered up the steep face of the 
rock, from projection to projection, until he 
reached the tree in which Miss Crabb sat. 


6o 


A Fortnight of Folly, 

Meantime she watclied him with admiring eyes 
and just as he was about to take her in his 
arms and descend with her she exclaimed : 

“ Wait a moment, I might lose the thought^ 
I’ll just jot it down.” 

She took her note-book and pencil again and 
hurriedly made the following entry: Sinewy, 
virile, lithe, hirsute, fearless, plwiky, bronzed, vig- 
orous, lank, Greek-eyed, Roman- nosed, prompt, 
large-eared, typical American. Good hero for 
dramatic, short, winning dialect story. The 
magazines never refuse dialect stories. 

“ Now, if you please, Mr. Tolliver, I will go 
with you.” 

It was an Herculean labor, but Tolliver was 
a true hero. W ith one arm wound around her^ 
after the fashion of the serpent in the group of the 
Laocobn, and with her long yellow hair stream- 
ing in crinkled jets over his shoulder, he slowly 
made his way down to the ground. 

Meantime Mose, the dog, with true canine 
sympathy and helpfulness, had torn the bonnet 
into pathetic shreds, and was now lying half 
asleep under a tree with a bit of ribbon in his 
teeth. 

“ Well, I’ll jest her — beg parding Miss Crabb, 
but thet ther dog hev et up yer head-gear,”’ 
said Tolliver as he viewed with dilating eyes 
the scattered fragments. 

She comprehended her calamity with one 
swift glance, but she had caught a new dialect 
phrase at the same time. 


A Fortnight of Folly. 6i 

“ Head-gear, you call it, I believe ? ” she 
inquired, again producing book and pencil. 

“ Beg parding all over, Miss Crabb, I meant 
bonnet,” he hurried to say. 

“ Oh, it’s all right, I assure you,” she replied, 
writing rapidly, “it’s a delightfully fresh and 
artistic bit of special coloring.” 

Miss Crabb’s clothes were badly tom and she 
looked as if she had spent the night wretchedly, 
but with the exception of a few slight scratches 
and bruises she was unhurt. 

“ Well jes’ look a there, will ye I ” exclaimed 
Tolliver as he spied Mose. There was more of 
admiration than anger in his voice. “ Ef thet 
ther ’fernal dog haint got yer chin-ribbon in his 
ole mouth, I’m er rooster!” 

“ Chin-ribbon,” repeated Miss Crabb, making 
a note, “I’m er rooster,” and she smiled with 
intense satisfaction. “You don’t know, Mr. 
Tolliver, how much I am indebted to you.” 

“ Not a tall. Miss Crabb, not a tall. Don’t 
mention of it,” he humbly said, “ hit taint wo’th 
talkin’ erbout.” 

The morning was in full blow now and the 
cat-birds were singing sweetly down the ravine. 
Overhead a patch of blue sky gleamed and 
burned with the true empyrean glow. Far 
away, down in the valley by the little river, a 
breakfast horn was blown with many a mellow 
flourish and a coo\ gentle breeze with dew on 
its wings fanned Miss Crabb’s sallow cheeks 
and rustled Tolliver’s tawny beard. At the 
sound of the horn Mose sprang to his feet and 


■62 A Fortnight of Folly. 

loped away with the bit of ribbon fluttering 
from his mouth. 


X. 

It was late in the forenoon before it was dis- 
covered at Hotel Helicon that Miss Crabb was 
missing, and even then there arose so many 
doubts about the tragic side of the event that 
before any organized search for her had been 
begun, she returned, appearing upon the scene 
mounted behind Wesley Tolliver on a small, 
thin, wiry mountain mule. 

Crane and Peck each drew a deep, swift sigh 
of relief upon seeing her, for the sense of guilt 
in their breasts had been horrible. They had 
by tacit conspiracy prevented any examination 
of Eagle’s Nest, for they dreaded what might be 
disclosed. Of course they did not mean to hide 
the awful fate of the poor girl, nor would they 
willingly have shifted tlie weight of their dread- 
ful responsibility, but it was all so much like a 
vivid dream, so utterly strange and theatrical 
as it arose in their memories, that they could 
not fully believe in it. 

Miss Crabb looked quite ludicrous perched 
behind the tall mountaineer on such a dwarfish 
mule. Especially comical was the effect of the 
sun-bonnet she wore. She had accepted this 
article of apparel from Tolliver’s mother, and it 
appeared to clutch her head in its stiff folds and 
to elongate her face by sheer compression. 

Everybody laughed involuntarily, as much 


A Fortnight of Folly. 65 , 

for joy at her safe return as in response to the 
demand of her melodramatic appearance. 

'‘I’ve brung back yer runerway,” said Tolli- 
ver cheerily, as he helped the young woman to 
dismount. “ She dim down the mounting by 
one pertic’ler trail an’ I jes’ fotch her up by 
t’other.” 

Miss Crabb spoke not a word, but ran into 
the hotel and up to her room without glancing 
to the right or to the left. In her great baste 
the stiff old sun-bonnet fell from her head and 
tumbled upon the ground. 

“ W ush ye’d jes’ be erbligin’ enough ter had 
thet there head-gear up ter me, Mister,” said 
Tolliver addressing Crane, who was standing 
near. “ My mammy ’d raise er rumpage ef I’d 
go back ’thout thet ther bonnet.” 

With evident reluctance and disgust Crane 
gingerly took up the fallen article and gave it 
to Tolliver, who thanked him so politely that 
all the onlooking company felt aglow of admira- 
tion for the uncouth and yet rather handsome 
cavalier. 

“Thet gal,” he observed, glancing in the 
direction that Miss Crabb had gone, “ she hev 
the winnin’est ways of any gal I ever seed in 
my life. Ye orter seen ’er up inter thet there 
bush a writin’ in ’er book I She’d jes’ tumbled 
kerwhummox down the clift an’ hed lodged 
ther’ in them cedars ; but as she wer’ a writin* 
when she started ter fall w’y she struck a 
writin’ an’ jes’ kep’ on at it same’s if nothin’ had 
happened. She’s game, thet ole gal air, I tell 


64 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

je ! She don’t propose for any little thing like 
failin’ offn a clift, ter interfere with w’at she’s 
a doin’ at thet time, le’ me say ter ye. Lord 
hut she wer’ hongry, though, settin’ up tber a 
writin’ all night, an’ it ’d a done ye good to a seen 
’er eat thet chicken and them cake-biscuits my 
mammy cooked for breakfast. She air a mos’ 
alarmin’ fine gal, for a fac’.” 

At this point Dufour came out of the hotel, 
and when Tolliver saw him tliere was an instan- 
taneous change in the expression of the moun- 
taineer’s face. 

“Well I’ll ber dorged!” he exclaimed with 
a smile of delight, “ef ther’ haint the same 
leetle John the Baptis’ what bapsonsed me down 
yer inter the branch! Give us yer baby- 
spanker, ole feller 1 How air ye 1 ” 

Dufour cordially shook hands with him, 
laughing in a jolly way. 

“ Fust an’ only man at ever ducked me, I’m 
here ter say ter ye,” Tolliver went on, in a 
cheery, half-bantering tone, and sitting sidewise 
on the mule. “Ye mus’ hev’ a sight o’ muscle 
onto them duck legs and bantam arms o’ 
your’n.” 

He had the last word still in his mouth when 
the little beast suddenly put down its head and 
flung high its hind feet. 

“ Woirp I” they heard him cry, as he whirled 
over in the air and fell sprawling on the 
ground. 

Dufour leaped forward to see if the man was 


A Fortnight of Folly. 65 

hurt, but Tolliver was upright in an instant and 
grinning sheepishly. 

“Thet’s right, Bonus,” he said to the mule 
which stood quite still in its place, ‘thet’s right 
ole fel, try ter ac’ smart in comp’ny. Yer a 
beauty now, ain’t ye? ” 

He replaced his hat, which had fallen from 
his head, patted the mule caressingly on the 
neck, then lightly vaulting to the old saddle- 
tree, he waved his hand to the company and 
turning dashed at a gallop down the moun- 
tain road, his spurs jingling merrily as he 
went. 

“ What a delicious character I ” 

“What precious dialecti ” 

“How typically American!” 

“ A veritable hero I ” 

Everybody at Hotel Helicon appeared to 
have been captivated by this droll fellow. 

“How like Tolstoi’s lovely Eussians he is!” 
observed Miss Fidelia Arkwright, of Boston, a 
near-sighted maiden who did translations and 
who doted on virile literature. 

“ When I was in Eussia, I visited Tolstoi at 
his shoe-shop — ” began Crane, but nobody 
appeared to hear him, so busy were all in mak- 
ing notes for a dialect story. 

“ Tolstoi is the greatest fraud of the nineteenth 
century,” said Peck. “That shoe-making pre- 
tence of his is about on a par with his genius in 
genuineness and sincerity. His novels are 
great chunks of raw filth, rank, garlic-garnished 
and hideous. We touch them only because the 
5 


66 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

Frencli critics have called them savory. If the 
Revue de Deux Mondes should praise a Turkish 
novel we could not wait to read it before we 
joined in. Tolstoi is remarkable for two things : 
his coarseness and his vulgar disregard of 
decency and truth. His life and his writings are 
alike crammed with absurdities and contradic- 
tory puerilities which would be laughable but 
for their evil tendencies.” 

“ But, my dear sir, how then do you account 
for the many editions of Tolstoi’s books ? ” 
inquired the historian, E. Hobbs Lucas. 

“ Just as I account for the editions of Cow- 
per and Montgomery and Wordsworth and even 
Shakespeare,” responded Peck. “ You put a ten 
per cent, author’s royalty on all those dear clas- 
sics and see how soon the publishers will quit 
uttering them I If Tolstoi’s Eussian raw meat 
stories were put upon the market in a fair com- 
petition with American novels the latter 
would beat them all hollow in selling.” 

“Oh, we ought to have international copy- 
right,” plaintively exclaimed a dozen voices, 
and so the conversation ended. 

Strangely enough, each one of the company 
in growing silent did so in order to weigh cer- 
tain suggestions arising out of Peck’s assertions. 
It was as if a score of semi-annual statements 
of copyright accounts were fluttering in the 
breeze, and it was as if a score of wistful 
voices had whispered : 

“ How in the world do publishers grow rich 
when the books they publish never sell? ” 


67 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

Perhaps Gaspard Du four should be mentioned 
as appearing to have little sympathy with 
Peck’s theory or with the inward mutterings it 
had engendered in the case of the rest of the 
company. 

If there was any change in Dufour’s face it 
was expressed in a smile of intense self-satisfac- 
tion. 


XI. 

It was, of course, not long that the newspapers 
of our wide-awake country were kept from giv- 
ing t-heir readers very picturesque glimpses of 
what was going on among the dwellers on Mt.. 
Boab. The humorists of the press, those charm- 
ing fellows whose work is so enjoyable wherr 
performed upon one’s neighbor and so excruci- 
ating when turned against oneself, saw the vul- 
nerable points of the situation and let go a 
broadside of ridicule that reverberated from the^ 
Atlantic to the Pacific. It became a matter of 
daily amusement among the inmates of Hotel 
Helicon to come together in little groups and 
discuss these humorous missiles fired upon 
them from California, Texas, Arkansas and 
Wisconsin, from Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Atlanta,, 
and Oil-City, Detroit and — , but from every where^ 
indeed. 

When it came to Miss Crabb’s adventure^ 
every humorist excelled himself in descriptive 
smartness and in cunning turns of ironical 
phrasing. The head-line experts did telling 
work in the same connection. All this was 


68 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

perfectly understood and enjoyed at home, out 
foreigners, especially the English, stubbornly 
insisted upon viewing it as the high-water 
mark of American refinement and culture. 

When tbat genial periodical, the Smartsburgh 
Bulldozer^ announced with due gravity that 
Miss Crabb, a Western journalist, had leaped 
from the top of Mt. Boab to the valley below, 
and had been caught in the arms of a stahvart 
moonshiner, where she safely reposed, etc., the 
London Times copied the paragraph and made 
it a text for a heavy editorial upon the barbaric 
influences of Eepublican institutions, to which 
the American Minister felt bound to advert in 
a characteristic after-dinner speech at a London 
club. So humorous, however, were his remarks 
that he was understood to be vigorously in 
earnest, and the result was perfect confirmation 
of the old world’s opinion as to the rudi- 
mentary character of our national culture. 

Meantime Hotel Helicon continued to be the 
scene of varied if not startling incidents. In 
their search for local color and picturesque 
material, the litterateurs invaded every nook 
and corner of the region upon and round about 
Mt. Boab, sketcbing, making notes, recording 
suggestions, studying dialect, and filling their 
minds with the uncouth peculiarities of the 
mountain folk. 

“It has come to this,” grumbled Peck, “that 
American literature, its fiction I mean, is 
founded on dialect drivel and vulgar yawp. 
Look at our magazines : four-fifths of their 


69 


A Fortnight of Folly, 

short stories are full of negro talk, or cracker 
lingo, or mountain jibberish, or New England 
farm yawp, or Hoosier dialect. It is horribly 
humiliating. It actually makes foreigners think 
that we are a nation of green- horns. Why, a 
day or two ago I had occasion to consult the 
article on American literature in the Encyclo- 
p86dia Britannica and therein I was told in one 
breath how great a writer and how truly Amer- 
ican Mr. Lowell is, and in the next breath I 
was informed that a poem beginning with the 
verse, ‘ Under the yaller pines I house ’ is one of 
his master-pieces I Do you see ? Do you catch, 
the drift of the Englishman’s argument? To 
be truly great, as an American,^ one must be sur- 
passingly vulgar, even in poetry ! ” 

This oft-hand shower of critical observation 
had as little effect upon the minds of Peck’s 
hearers as a summer rain has on the backs of a 
flock of ducks. They even grew more vehe- 
ment in their pursuit of locai color. 

When I was spending, a month at Bock- 
ledge castle with Lord Knownaught,” said Crane, 
“ his lordship frequently suggested that I should 
make a poem on the life of Jesse James.” 

“Well, why didn’t you do it?” inquired 
Miss Crabb with a ring of impatience in her 
voice, “ if you had you might have made a hit. 
You might have attracted some attention.” 

Dufour laughed heartily, as if he had caught 
some occult humor from the young woman’s 
words. 


70 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

“ I did write it,” said Crane retrospective /, 
“ and sent it to George Dunkirk & Co.” 

“ Well? ” sighed Miss Crabb with intense 
i nterest. 

“ Well,” replied Crane, “they rejected die 
MS. without reading it.” 

Again Dufour laughed, as if at a good jc ke. 

“ George Dunkirk & Co. ! ” cried Guilford 
Ferris, the romancer, “ George Dunkirk k Co. I 
They are thieves. They have been making 
false reports on copyright to me for fiv(^ years 
or more ! ” 

Dufour chuckled as if his jaws would fall off, 
and finally with a red face and gleaming, 
humorous eyes got up from the chair he was 
filling on the veranda, and went i,p to his 
room. 

The rest of the company look<,d at one 
another inquiringly. 

“ Who is he, anyhow? ” demand-^d Peck. 

“ That’s just my query,” said Fe^-ris. 

“ Nobody in the house knows anything defi- 
nite about him,” remarked E. Dobbs Lucas. 
“ And yet he evidently is a distinguished per- 
son, and his name haunts me.” 

“ So it does me,” said Miss Moyne. 

“ I tell you he’s a newspaper reporter. His 
cheek proves that,” remarked Peck. 

Miss Crabb made a note, her own cheek 
flaming. “I presume you call that humor,” 
she observed, “it’s about like New York’s best 
efforts. In the West reporters are respectable 
people.” 


7 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

I beg pardon,” Peck said hastily, “ I did 
not mean to insinuate that anybody is not respect- 
able. Everybody is eminently respectable if I 
speak of them. I never trouble myself with 
the other kind.” 

“ Well, I don’t believe that Mr. Dufour is a 
reporter at all,” replied Miss Crabb, with em- 
phasis, “ for he’s not inquisitive, he don’t make 
notes, and he don’t appear to be writing any.” 

“ In my opinion he’s a realist — a genuine 
analytical, motive-dissecting, commonplace- 
recording, international novelist in disguise,” 
said Ferris. 

“Oh ! ” 

“ Ah r ” 

“ Dear me I ” 

“But who?” 

“ It may be Arthur Selby himself, incog. 
Who knows ? ” 

“ Humph ! ” growled Crane with a lofty 
scrowl, “ I should think I ought to know Selby. 
I drank wine with him at — ” 

His remark was cut short by the arrival of 
the mail and the general scramble that followed. 

Upon this occasion the number of newspapers 
that fell to the hand of each guest was much 
greater than usual, and it was soon discovered 
that Miss Crabb’s latest letter had been forwarded 
to a “ syndicate ” and was appearing simul- 
taneously in ninety odd different journals. 

No piece of composition ever was more stun- 
ningly realistic or more impartially, na^q 
abjectly truthful than was that letter. •'It gave 

* 


72 A Fortnight of Folly. 

a minute account of the quarrel between Peck 
and Crane over their attentions to Miss Moyne, 
the fight, Miss Crabb’s fall, the subsequent 
adventures and all the hotel gossip of every 
sort. It was personal to the last degree, but it 
was not in the slightest libelous. No person 
could say that any untruth had been told, or 
even that any tinge of false-coloring had been 
laid upon the facts as recorded ; and yet how 
merciless 1 

Of course Miss Crabb’s name did not appeal 
with the article, save as one of its subjects, and 
she saw at once that she had better guard hei 
secret. 

That was a breeze which rustled through 
Hotel Helicon. Every;body was supremely 
indignant ; but there was no clue to the traitor 
who had thus betrayed everybody’s secrets. It 
would be absurd to suppose that Miss Crabb 
was not suspected at once, on account of her 
constant and superfluous show of note- making, 
still there were others who might be guilty. 
Crane and Peck were indignant, the former 
especially ready to resent to the death any allu- 
sion to the details of the duel. Miss Moyne 
with the quick insight of a clever and gifted 
young woman, comprehended the situation in 
its general terms and was vexed as much as 
amused. The whole thing had to her mind the 
appearance of a melodramatic, broadly sensa- 
tional sketch, in which she had played the part 
of the innocent, unconscious, but all-powerful 
heroine. Indeed the newspaper account placed 


A Fortnight of Folly. 73 

her ii. this uripieasant attitude before a million 
i-eaders. 

“ A lucky affair for you, Miss Moyne,” said 
Dufou^ to her, a few days later, “you cannot 
over-reckon the boom it will give to your latest 
book. You may expect a pretty round sum 
with your next copyright statement.” 

He spoke with the voice and air of one who 
knew how to read the signs of the day. 

“ But the ridiculous idea of having all this 
stuff' about me going the rounds of the news- 
papers ! ” she responded, her beautiful patrician 
face showing j ust a hint of color. 

“ Don’t care for it a moment,” said Dufour,. 
“it will not hurt you.” 

“The thought of having that hideous picture 
in all the patent inside pages of the cheap press, 
with my name under it, en toutes Uttres^ and — 
why it is horrible I ” she went on, with trem- 
bling lips. 

Dufour smiled upon her, as if indulgently, a 
curious, tender gleam in his eyes. 

“ W ait,” he said, “ and don’t allow it to trouble 
you. The world discriminates pretty well, 
after all. It will not hurt you. It’s a mighty 
boom for you.” 

She looked at him with a sudden flash in her 
cheeiis and eyes, and exclaimed almost vehem- 
ently : “ I will not permit it ! They shall not 

do it. I cannot bear to be treated as if — as if 
I were a theatrical person — a variety actress ! ” 

“ My dear Miss Moyne,” he hurriedly said, 
his own face showing a tinge of embarrassment, 


74 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

you are taking a wrong point of view, indeed 
you are. Wait till you see tlie out-come.” His 
tone was humble and apologetic as he continued 
— “ My opinion is that this very thing will 
quadruple the sales of your book.” 

“ I don’t want them quadrupled,” she cried, 
“just look at that front hair and that nose!” 
She held up a newspaper for him to inspect 
a picture of herself, a miserable, distorted thing. 
“ It is absolutely disgraceful. My dresses never 
fit like that, and who ever saw me with a man’a 
collar on ! ” 

Tears were in her beautiful eyes. 

Hufour consoled her as best he could, though 
he could not resist the temptation to suggest 
that even a caricature of her face was sure to 
have in it the fascination of genuine loveliness, 
a suggestion which was phrased with consum- 
mate art and received with an appearance of 
innocence that was beyond all art. 

XII. 

Summer on Mt. Boab was much like summer 
on any other mountain, and life at Hotel Helicon 
was very like life at any other mountain hotel, 
save that a certain specialization due to the 
influence of literature and art was apparent in 
the present instance, giving to the house, the 
landscape and the intercourse of the guests a 
peculiar tinge, so to say, of self-consciousness 
and artificiality. Hot tha-t these authors, thus 
drawn together by the grace of a man grown 
suddenly rich, were very different from men and 


75 


A Fortnight of Folly, 

women of other lines in life, the real peculiarity 
sprang out of the obligation by which every 
one felt bound to make the most, in a profes- 
sional way, of the situation and the environ- 
ment. Perhaps there was not a soul under the 
broad roof of Hotel Helicon, servants excepted, 
that did not secrete in its substance the material 
for a novel, a poem, or an essay which was to 
brim with the local life and flash with the local 
color of the region of Mt. Boab. Yes, there 
appeared to be one exception. Dufour constantly 
expressed a contempt for the mountaineers and 
their country. 

“ To be sure,” he conceded, “ to be sure there 
is a demand for dialect stories, and I suppose 
that they must be written ; but for my part I 
cannot see why we Americans must stultify 
ourselves in the eyes of all the world by flood- 
ing our magazines, newspapers and books with 
yawp instead of with a truly characteristic 
American literature of a high order. There is 
some excuse for a quasi-negro literature, and 
even the Creoles might have a niche set apart 
for them, but dialect, on the whole, is growing 
to be a literary bore.” 

“ But don’t you think,” said Miss Crabb, draw- 
ing her chin under, and projecting her upper 
teeth to such a degree that anything like real- 
istic description would appear brutal, “don’t 
you. think, Mr. Dufour, that Mr. Tolliver would 
make a great character in a mountain romance ? ” 

“ Ho. There is nothing great in a clown, as 


76 A Fortnight of Folly. 

such,” he promptly answered. “If Tolliver is 
great he would be great without his jargon.” 

“Yes,” she admitted, “but the picturesque- 
ness, the color, the contrast, you know, would 
be gone. Now Craddock — ” 

“Craddock is excellent, so long as there is but 
one Craddock, but when there are some dozens- 
of him it is different,” said Dufour, “ and it is- 
the process of multiplication that I object to. 
There’s Cable, who is no longer a genius of one 
species. The writers of Creole stories are swarm- 
ing by the score, and, poor old Uncle Remus! 
everybody writes negro dialect now. Literary 
claim-jumpers are utterly conscienceless. The 
book market will soon be utterly ruined.” 

Miss Crabb puffed out her lean sallow cheeks 
and sighed heavily. 

“I had hoped,” she said, “to get my novel on 
the market before this, but I have not yet found 
a publisher to suit me.” 

She winced inwardly at this way of express- 
ing the fact that every publisher, high and low, 
far and near, had declined her MS. out of hand- 
but she could not say the awful truth in its sim- 
pliest terms, while speaking to one so prosperous 
as Dufour. She felt that she must at all haz- 
ards preserve a reasonable show of literary inde- 
pendence. Crane came to her aid. 

“One publisher is just as good as another,”’ 
he said almost savagely. “They are all thieves. 
They report every book a failure, save those 
they own outright, and yet they all get rich. I 
shall publish for myself my next volume.” 


77 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

Dufour smiled grimly and turned away. It 
was rather monotonous, this iteration and reiter- 
ation of so grave a charge against the moral 
character of publishers, and this threat of Crane’s 
to become his own publisher was a bit of uncon- 
scious and therefore irresistible humor. 

“It’s too pathetic to be laughed at,” Dufour 
thought, as he strolled along to where Miss 
Mo3me sat under a tree, “but that Kentuckian 
actually thinks himself a poet I” 

With all his good nature and kind hearted- 
ness, Dufour could be prejudiced, and he drew 
the line at what he called the “prevailing ten- 
dency toward boastful prevarication among 
Kentucky gentlemen.” 

As he walked away he heard Crane saying: 

“George Dunkirk & Co. have stolen at least 
twenty thousand dollars in royalties from me 
during the past three years.” 

It was the voice of Ferris that made interrog- 
ative response: 

“ Is Dunkirk your publisher? ” 

“Yes, or rather my robber.” 

“ Glad of it, misery loves company.” 

Dufour half turned about and cast a quick 
glance at the speakers. He did not say any- 
thing, however, but resumed his progress toward 
Miss Moyne, who had just been joined by Mrs. 
Nancy Jones Black, a stoutish and oldish woman 
very famous on account of having assumed 
much and done little. Mrs. Nancy Jones Black 
was from Boston. She was president of the 
Woman’s Antiquarian Club, of the Ladies’ Greek 


78 A Fortnight of Folly, 

Association, of The Sappho Patriotic Club, of 
the Newport Fashionable Near-sighted Club for 
the study of Esoteric Transcendentalism, and it 
may not be catalogued how many more societies 
and clubs. She was a great poet who had never 
written any great poem, a great essayist whom 
publishers and editors avoided, whom critics 
regarded as below mediocrity, but of whom 
everybody stood in breathless awe, and she was 
an authority in many literary and philosophical 
fields of which she really knew absolutely noth- 
ing. She was a reformer and a person of influ- 
ence who had made a large number of her kins- 
folk famous as poets and novelists without any 
apparent relevancy between the fame and the 
literary work done. If your name were Jones 
and you could trace out your relationship to 
Mrs. Nancy Jones Black and could get Mrs. 
Nancy Jones Black interested in your behalf, 
you could write four novels a year with great 
profit ever afterward. 

As Dufour approached he heard Miss Moyne 
say: 

“ I publish my poor little works with George 
Dunkirk k Co. and the firm has been very kind 
to me. I feel great encouragement, but I don’t 
see how I can bear this horrible newspaper 
familiarity and vulgarity.” 

“My dear child,” said Mrs. Nancy Jones 
Black, placing her plump, motherly hand on the 
young woman’s arm, “ you must not appear to 
notice it. Do as did my daughter Lois when 
they assailed her first little novel with sugar- 


9 


A Fortnight of Folly ^ 

plum praise. Why, when it began to leak out 
that Lois was the author of A Sea-Side Sym- 
phony the poor girl was almost smothered with 
praise. Of course I had to take the matter in 
hand and under my advice Lois went abroad for 
six months. When she returned she found her- 
self famous.” 

“ Talking shop ? ” inquired Dufour, accepting 
the offer of a place on the beuch beside Mrs. 
Black. 

“Yes,” said she, with a comprehensive wave 
of her hand, “ I am taking Miss Moyne under 
my wing, so to say, and am offering her the 
comfort of my experience. She is a genius 
whom it doesn’t spoil to praise. She’s going to 
be the next sensation in the East.” 

“ I suggested as much to her,” said Dufour. 
“ She is already on a strong wave, but she must 
try and avoid being refractory, you know.” He 
said this in a straightforward, business way, 
but his voice was touched with a certain sort 
of admirable tenderness. 

Miss Moyne was looking out over the deep, 
hazy valley, her cheeks still warm with the 
thought of that newspaper portrait with its 
shabby clothes and towsled bangs. What was 
fame, bought at such a price ! She bridled a 
little, but did not turn her head as she said : 

“ I am not refractory, I am indignant, and I 
have a right to be. They cannot justify the 
liberty they have taken, besides I will not 
accept notoriety — I — ” 

“ There, now, dear, that is what Lois said, and 


■8e A Fcrtnighl of Folly. 

Milton John Jones, my nephew, was at first 
bound that he wouldn’t let Tom, my brother, 
advertise him ; but he soon saw his way clear. 
I assure you, and now he publishes four serials 
at once. Be prudent, dear, be prudont.” 

“ But the idea of picturing me with great bar- 
baric rings in my ears and with a corkscrew 
curl on each side and — ” 

Dufour interrupted her with a laugh almost 
hearty enough to be called a guffaw, and Mrs. 
Black smiled indulgently as if at a clever child 
which must be led, not driven. 

“ Being conscious that you really are stylish 
and beautiful, you needn’t care for the picture,” 
said Dufour, in a tone of sturdy sincerity. 

“There is nothing so effective as a foil,” 
added Mrs. Black. 

Miss Moyne arose and with her pretty chin 
slightly elevated walked away. 

“ How beautiful she is I ” exclaimed Dufour, 
gazing after her, “ and I am delighted to know 
that you are taking an interest in her.” 

Mrs. Black smiled complacently, and with a 
bland sidewise glance at him, remarked : 

“ She grows upon one.” 

“Yes,” said he, with self-satisfied obtuse- 
ness, “ yes, she is magnetic, she is a genuine 
genius.” ^ 

“Precisely, she stirs one’s heart strangely,” 
replied Mrs. Black. 

“Yes, I have noted that ; it’s very remarka- 
ble.” 


8i 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

“ You should speak of it to her at the first 
opportunity.” 

Dufour started a little, flushed and finally 
laughed as one does who discovers a bit of 
clever and harmless treachery. 

“If I only dared,” he presently said, with 
something very like fervor in his tone. “ If I 
only dared.” 

Mrs. Black looked at him a moment, as if 
measuring in her mind his degree of worthiness, 
then with a wave of her hand she said : 

“ Never do you dare to dare. Mr. Crane stands 
right in your path.” 

Dufour leaped to his feet with the nimblenesa 
and dangerous celerity of a tiger. 

“ Crane I ” he exclaimed with a world of con- 
tempt in his voice, “ If he — ” but he stopped 
short and laughed at himself. 

Mrs. Black looked at him with a patronizing 
expression in her eyes. 

“ Leave it to me,” she said, in her jnost insin- 
uating tone. 


XIII. 

Crane tried not to show the bitterness he felt 
as he saw his hope of winning the favor of Miss 
Moyne fading rapidly out, but now and again a 
cloud of irresistible melancholy fell upon him. 

At such times it was his habit to lean upon 
the new fence that circumscribed Hotel Helicon 
and dreamily smoke a cigar. He felt a blind 
desire to assassinate somebody, if he could only 
know who. Of course not Peck, for Peck, too, 


82 A Fortnight of Folly. 

was disconsolate, but somebody, anybody wbo 
would claim the place of a successful rival. 

One morning wliile he stood thus regaling 
himself with his tobacco and his misery, Tolli- 
ver rode up, on a handsome horse this time, 
and, lifting his broad hat, bowed picturesquely 
and said : 

“Good mornin,’ Kyernel, how’re ye this 
momin’ ? ” 

“ Good morning,” growled Crane. 

Tolliver looked off over the valley and 
■up at the sky which was flecked with tags of 
fleece-cloud. 

“ Hit look like hit mought rain in er day er 
two,” he remaiked. 

“Yes, I don’t know, quite likely,” said Crane, 
gazing evasively in another direction. 

“ Ever’body’s well, I s’pose, up ther’ at the 
tavern ? ” inquired Tolliver. 

“ I believe so,” was the cold answer. 

Tolliver, leaned over the pommel of nis 
saddle-tree and combed his horse’s mane with 
his sinewy fingers. Meantime the expression 
in his face was one of exceeding embarrassment 
blent with cunning. 

“ Kyernel, c’u’d ye do a feller a leetle yerrent 
what’s of importance ? ” he asked with peculiar 
faltering. 

“ Do what ? ” inquired Crane lifting his eye- 
brows and turning the cigar in his mouth. 

“ Jest a leetle frien’ly job o’ kindness,” said 
Tolliver, “jest ter please ask thet young leddy 
— thet Miss Crabb ’at I fotch up yer on er mule 


83 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

tot her day, }^e know ; well, jest ax her for me ef 
I moughtn’t come in an’ see ’er on pertic’lar 
an’ pressin’ business, ef ye please, sir.” 

By this time the mountaineer’s embarrass- 
ment had become painfully apparent. Any 
good judge of human nature could have seen at. 
once that he was almost overcome with the- 
burden and worry of the matter in hand. His; 
cheeks were pale and his eyes appeared to be 
fading into utter vacancy of expression. Crane 
told him that there was no need to be particu- 
larly formal, that if he would go in and ask for 
Miss Crabb she would see him in the parlor. 

“ But, Kyernel, hit’s er private, sort er confi- 
dential confab ’at I must hev wi’ ’er, an’ — ” 

“ Oh, well, that’s all right, you’ll not beinter- 
nipted in the parlor.” 

“ Air ye pine blank shore of it, Kyernel ? ” 
Certainly.” 

Dead shore ? ” 

Quite, I assure you.” 

Crane had become interested in Tolliver’s; 
affair, whatever it might be. He could not 
keep from sharing the man’s evident intensity 
of mood, and all the time he was wondering 
what the matter could be. Certainly no com- 
mon-place subject could so affect a man of iron 
like Tolliver. The poet’s lively imagination 
was all aglow ov<^r the mystery, but it could 
not formulate any reasonable theory of explana- 
tion. 

M iss Crabb appeared in the parlor promptly 
and met Tolliver with a cordiality that, instead 


84 Fortnight of Folly, 

of reassuring him, threw him into another 
fit of embarrassment from which lie at first 
made no effort to recover. His wide-brimmed 
hat, as he twirled it on his knees, quivered 
convulsively in accord with the ague of excite 
ment with which his whole frame was shaking 
He made certain soundless movements with 
his lips, as if muttering to himself. 

Miss Crabb at first did not notice his confu- 
sion, and, went on talking rapidly, reiterating 
thanks for the kindness he had fhowm her in 
her recent mishap, and managing to put into 
her voice some tones that to him sounded very 
tender and sweet. 

“You don’t know — you can’t imagine, Mr. 
Tolliver, what I suffered during that awful 
night,” she said, turning her head to one side 
and drawing her chin under until it almost dis- 
appeared in the lace at her throat. “ It was hor 
rible.” 

Tolliver looked at her helplessly, his mouth 
open, his eyes dull and sunken. 

“How did you happen to discover me up 
there, anyway, Mr. Tolliver ? ” she demanded, 
leaning toward him and laughing a little. 

“ The dog he treed ye, an’ then I seed ye 
settin’ up ther’ er writin’ away,” he manged to 
say a wave of relief passing over his face at 
the sound of his own voice. 

“It was perfectly ridiculous, perfectly pre^ 
posterous,” she exclaimed, “but I’m mighty 
thankful that I was not hurt.” 

“Yes, well ye mought be. Miss Crabb,” he 


A Fortnight of Folly. 85 

stammered out. “Wonder ye wasn’t scrunclied 
inter p'eces an’ scattered all eround ther’.” 

She slipped out her book, took a pencil from 
over her ear and made a note. 

Tolliver eyed her dolefully. “How do you 
spell scrunclied, Mr. Tolliver, in your dialect?” 
she paused to inquire. 

His jaw fell a little lower for a moment, then 
he made an effort: 

“ S — q — r — u — ” he paused and shook his 
head, “ S — q — k — no thet’s not hit — s — k — q — 
r — dorg ef I ken spell thet word — begging 
yer parding, hit air ’tirely too hard for me.” 
He settled so low in his chair that his knees 
appeared almost as high as his head. 

“ All right,” she cheerily exclaimed, “ I can 
get it phonetically. It’s a new word. I don’t 
think either Craddock or Johnson uses it, it’s 
valuable.” 

There was a silence during which Miss Crabb 
thoughtfully drummed on her projecting front 
teeth with the end of her pencil. 

Tolliver nerved himself and said: 

“Miss Crabb I — I, well, ye know, I — that is, 
begging yer parding, but I hev something’ I 
want er say ter ye, ef ye please.” He glanced 
furtively around, as if suspecting that some 
person lay secreted among the curtains of a bay 
window hard by. And indeed, Dufour was 
there, lightly indulging in a morning nap, while 
the mountain breeze flowed over him. He was 
in a deep bamboo chair behind those very cur- 
tains. 


86 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

“Ob, certainly, certainly, Mr. Tolliver, go on, 
I shall be delighted, charmed indeed, to hear 
what you have to say,” Miss Crabb responded, 
turning a fresh leaf of her note -book and putting 
on a hopeful look. 

“ I hope ye’ll stick ter thet after I’ve done 
said it ter ye,” he proceeded to say, “ but dorg 
on me ef I know how ter begin sayin’ it.” 

“Oh, just go right on, it’s all right; I assure 
yon, Mr. Tolliver, I am very anxious to hear.” 

“ Mebbe ye air, I don’t dispute yer word, 
but I feel mighty onery all the same.” 

“Onery is a Western word,” mused Miss 
Crabb, making a note. 

“Proceed, Mr. Tolliver,” she continued after 
a pause, “proceed, I am listening with great 
interest.” 

“What I’m ergwine ter state ter ye mought 
inek ye mad, but hit can’t be holp, I jest hev 
ter say it — ^I air jest erbleeged ter say it.” 

H'is voice was husky and he was assuming a 
tragic air. Miss Crabb felt a strange thrill 
creep throughout her frame as a sudden suspi- 
cion seemed to leap back and forth between her 
heart and her brain. 

“ N'o, I assure you that I could not be angry 
with you, Mr. Tolliver, under any circum- 
stances,” she murmured, “you have been so 
very kind to me.” 

“ Hit air awful confusin’ an’ hit mek a feller 
feel smaller ’n a mouse ter speak it right out, 
but then hit air no foolishness, hit air pine 
blank business.” 


A Fortnight of Folly, 87 

“Of course,” said Miss Crabb pensively, 
**of course you feel some embarrassment.” 

He hitched himself up in his chair and crossed 
his legs. 

“Ef ye don’t like w’at I say, w’y I won’t 
blame ye a bit. I feel jest as if I wer a doin’ 
somethin’ ’at I hadn’t orter do, but my mammy 
she say I must, an’ that do everlastin’ly settle 
it.” 

“Yes, your mother’s advice is always safe.” 

“Safe, ! shed say so! Hit’s mighty onsafe 
fer me not ter foller it, I kin tell ye. She’d 
thump my old gourd fer me in ermazin’ style 
ef I didn’t.” 

“ Thump my old gourd,” repeated Miss Crabb, 
making a note. “Go on, Mr. Tolliver, please.” 

“S’pose I mought as well, seein’ ’at it has 
ter be said.” He paused, faltered, and then pro- 
ceeded : “ W ell, beggin’ yer parding. Miss 
Crabb, but ever sence ye wer’ down ther’ ter 
we all’s cabin, hit’s been a worryin’ my mammy 
and me, an’ we hev’ talked it all over an’ 
over.” 

“Yes,” sighed Miss Crabb. 

“ Hit's not the cost of them beads. Miss Crabb, 
they air not wo’th much, but they was guv ter 
mammy by her aunt Mandy Ann Bobus, an’ 
she feel like slie jest can’t give ’em up.” 

Miss Crabb looked puzzled. 

“Ef ye’ll jest erblige me an’ hand them beads 
over ter me. I’ll never say er wo’d ter nobody 
ner nothin.” 

“Mr. Tolliver, what in the world do you 


88 


A Fortnight of Folly, 

mean?” cried Miss Crabb, rising and standing 
before him with a face that flamed witb sudden 
anger. 

‘'Ye mougbt er tuck ’em kinder accidentally, 
ye know,” he suggested in a conciliatory tone, 
rising also. 

“Mr. Tolliver I” she almost screamed, 

“Ther’ now, be still, er ye’ll let ever’body 
know all erbout it,” he half whispered. “ Hit’d 
be disgraceful.” 

“ Mr. Tolliver! ” 

“ Sh-h-h ! They’ll hear ye ! ” 

“ Get right out of this room, you — 

Just then Dufour, who had been slowlv 
aroused from his nap and who while yet half 
asleep had overheard much of what had been 
said, stepped forth from behind the curtains and 
stood looking from one to the other of the 
excited actors in the little drama. 

“ What’s up ? ” he, demanded bluntly. 

“ Ke’s accusing me of stealing beads I ” cried 
Miss Crabb. “He’s insulting me!” 

“ What ! ” exclaimed Dufour, glaring at Tol- 
liver. 

“I feel mighty onery a doin’ it,” said Tolli- 
ver, “but hit air pine blank mighty suspicious, 
Kyernel, hit air for a fac’.” 

Dufour looked as if he hardly knew which he 
should do, laugh boisterously, or fling Tolliver 
out of the window, but he quickly pulled him- 
self together and said calmly : 

“You are wrong, sir, and you must apolo- 
gize.” 


89 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

“Certingly, certingly,” said Tolliver, “thet 
air jest what I air a doin’. I beg parding er 
thousan’ times fer sayin’ what I hev, bat, Kyer- 
nel, hit air a Lor’ a mighty’s truth, all the same, 
le' me tell ye. Them beads was ther’ w’en she 
come, an’ they was gone w’en she was gone, 
an’ — ” 

“Stop that I Take back those words or I’ll 
throw you — ” 

Dufour took a step towards Tolliver, but 
stopped suddenly when the latter drew a huge 
revolver with one hand and a long crooked 
bowie-knife with the other and said : 

“ No yer don’t, Kyernel, not by er good deal. 
Jest ye open yer bread-trap ergain an’ I’ll jest 
clean up this ole shanty in erbout two min- 
utes.” 

It may not be inferred how this bit of 
dramatic experience would have ended had not 
a lean, wizzen-faced mountain lad rushed in 
just then with a three-cornered piece of paper 
in his hand upon which was scrawled the fol- 
lowing message: 

“ I hev fown them beeds. They wus in mi 
terbacker bag.” 

Tolliver read this and wilted. 

The boy was panting and almost exhausted. 
He had run all the way up the mountain from 
the Tolliver cabin. 

“Yer mammy say kum home,” he gasped. 

“Hit air jest as I ’spected,” said Tolliver. 
“ Mammy hev made a pine blank eejit of me 
again.” He handed the message to Dufour as 


90 A Fortnight of Folly. 

he spoke. His pistol and knife had disap- 
peared. 

A full explanation followed, and at the end 
of a half-hour Tolliver went away crest-fallen 
but happy. 

As for Miss Crabb she had made a number 
of vraluable dialect notes. 

Dufour promised not to let the rest of the 
guests know what had just happened in the 
parlor. 

XIY. 

“ Literature-making has not yet taken the 
rank of a profession, but of late the world has 
modified its opinion as to the ability of literary 
people to drive a* close bargain, or to manage 
financial affairs with success. Many women 
and some men have shown that it is possible 
for a vivid imagination and a brilliant style in 
writing to go close along with a practical judg- 
ment and a fair share of selfish shrewdness in 
matters of bargain and sale. Still, after all, it 
remains true that a strong majority of literary 
people are of the Micawber genus, with great 
faith in what is to turn up, always nicely bal- 
ancing themselves on the extreme verge of 
expectancy and gazing over into the promise- 
land of fame and fortune with pathetically hope- 
ful, yet awfully hollow eyes. Indeed there is 
no species of gambling more uncertain in its 
results or more irresistibly fascinating to its vic- 
tims than literary gambling. Day after day, 
month after month, year after year, the 


91 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

deluded, enthusiastic, ever defeated but never 
discouraged writer plies his pen, besieges the 
publishers and editors, receives their rebuffs, 
rough or smooth, takes back his declined manu- 
scripts, tries it over and over, sweats, fumes, 
execrates, coaxes, bullies, raves, re-writes, takes a 
new norm de plume and new courage, goes on and 
on to the end. Here or there rumor goes that 
some fortunate literator has turned the right 
card and has drawn a great prize ; this rumor, 
never quite authentic, is enough to re-invigorate 
all the fainting scribblers and to entice new vic- 
tims into the gilded casino of the Cadmean vice. 
The man who manipulates the literary machine 
is the publisher, that invisible person who usu- 
ally grows rich upon the profits of unsuccessful 
books. He it is who inveigles the infatuated 
young novelist, essayist, or poet, into the beau- 
tiful bunco-den of the book business and there 
fastens him and holds him as long as he will 
not sqi^eal ; but at the first note of remonstrance 
he kicks him out and fills his place with a fresh 
victim.. The literary Micawber, however, does 
not despair. He may be a little silly from the 
effect of the summersault to which the pub- 
lisher’s boot has treated him, but after a 
distraught look about him he gets up, brushes 
the dust off his seedy clothes and goes directly 
back into the den again with another manu- 
script under his arm and with a feverish faith 
burning in his deep-set eyes. What serene and 
beautiful courage, by the 'way, have the literary 
women I Of course the monster who presides 


92 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

at the publisher’s desk cannot be as brutal to- 
her as he is to men, but he manipulates her 
copyright statements all the same, so that her 
book never passes the line of fifteen hundred 
copies sold. How can we ever account for a. 
woman who has written forty-three novels under 
such circumstances and has died, finally, a. 
devout Christian and a staunch friend of her 
publisher? Poor thing ! up to the hour of her 
demise, white-haired, wrinkled, over-worked, 
nervous and semi-paralytic, she nursed the rosy 
hope that to-morrow, or at the very latest, the 
day after to-morrow, the reward of all her self- 
devotion would come to her in the form of a 
liberal copyright statement from her long-suf- 
fering and charitable publisher. 

“Out in the West they have a disease called 
milk- sickness, an awful malady, of which every- 
body stands in deadly terror, but which nobody 
has ever seen. If you set out to find a case of 
milk-sickness it is like following a will-o'-the- 
wisp^ it is always just a little way farther on^ 
over ill the next settlement ; you never find it. 
The really successful author in America is, like 
the milk-sickness, never visible, except on the 
remote horizon. You hear much of him, but 
you never have the pleasure of shaking his. 
cunning right hand. The fact is, he is a myth. 
On the other hand, however, the American 
cities are full of successful publishers who have 
become millionaires upon the prohts of books 
which have starved their authors. Of course 
this appears to be a paradox, but I suppose that 


95 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

it can be explained by the rule of profit and 
loss. The autlior’s loss is the publisher’s profit.” 

The foregoing is, in substance, the opening 
part of an address delivered by Ferris before the 
assembled guests of Hotel Helicon. 

Mrs. Nancy Jones Black presided at the 
meeting ; indeed she always presided at meet- 
ings. On this occasion, which was informal and 
impromptu, Ferris was in excellent mood for 
speaking, as he just had been notified by a letter 
from Dunkirk & Co. that he was expected to 
pay in advance for the plates of his new romance, 
A Mysterious Missive., and that a personal check 
would not be accepted — a draft on New York 
must be sent forthwith. Although Ferris was 
a thoroughly good fellow, who cared nothing 
for money as money, this demand for a sum the 
half of which he could not command if his life 
were at stake, hit him like a bullet-stroke. A 
chance to talk off the soreness of the wound was 
accepted with avidity. He felt guilty of a 
meanness, it is true, in thus stirring up old 
troubles and opening afresh ancient hurts in the 
breasts of his listening friends ; but the relief to 
him was so great that he could not forego it. “ The 
American publisher,” he went on, “ proclaims 
himself a fraud by demanding of the author a 
contract which places the author’s business 
wholly in the control of the publisher. I take 
it that publishers are just as honest and just as 
dishonest, as any other class of respectable men. 
You know and I know, that, as a rule, the man 
who trusts his business entirely to others will, 


94 


A Fortnight of Folly, 

in the long run, be robbed. Administrators of 
•estates rob the heirs, in two-thirds of the 
instances, as every probate lawyer well knows. 
Every merchant has to treat his clerks and sales- 
men as if they were thieves, or if he do not they 
v/ill become thieves. The government Inus to 
appoint bank examiners to watch the bnnkem, 
and yet they steal. The Indian agents steal 
from the government. Senators steal, aldermen 
steal. Wall street men steal from one aiioiliei 
and from everybody else. Canada is overflow- 
ing with men who have betrayed and robbed 
those who trusted their business with them 
Even clergymen (that poorly paid and much- 
abused class) now and again fall before the temp- 
tation offered by the demon of manipulated 
returns of trust funds. The fact is, one may 
feel perfectly safe in saying that in regaicl 
to all the professions, trades, and occupations, 
there is absolutely no safety in trusting one’s 
affairs wholly in the hands of another. (Great 
applause). Even your milkman waters the 
milk and the dairyman sells you butter that 
never was in a churn. If you neglect to keep 
a pass-book your grocer runs up the bill to— 
(a great rustle, and some excited whispering) up 
to something enormous. Of course it is not 
•everybody that is dishonest, but experience 
shows that if a man has the temptation to 
defraud his customers constantly before him, 
with absolutely no need to fear detection, he 
will soon reason himself into believing it his 


A Fortnight of Folly. 95, 

right 10 have the lion’s share of all that goes 
into his hands. 

“ Now isn’t it strange, in view of the premises, 
that nobody ever heard of such a thing as a 
publisher being convicted of making false 
returns? Is it possible that the business of 
book-publishing is so pure and good of itself 
that it attracts to it none but perfect men? 
(Great applause). Publishers do fail financially 
once in a while, but their books of accounts 
invariably show that just eleven hundred and 
forty copies of each copyrighted book on their 
lists have been sold to date, no more, no less. 
(Suppressed applause). Nobody ever saw 
cleaner or better balanced books of accounts 
than those kept by the publishers. They foot 
up correctly to a cent. Indeed it would be a 
very strange thing if a man couldn’t make 
books balance under such circumstances ! (Pro- 
longed hand-clapping). I am rather poor at 
double entry, but I fancy I could make a credit 
of eleven hundred and forty copies sold, so as 
to have it show up all right. (Cheers). I must 
not lose my head in speaking on this sub- 
ject, for I cannot permit you to misunderstand, 
my motive. So long as authors submit to the 
per centum method of publication, so long they 
will be the prey of the publishers. The only 
method by which justice can be assured to both 
author and publisher is the cash-sale method. 
If every author in America would refuse to let 
his manuscript go out of hand before he had 
received the cash value for it, the trade would 


-96 A Fortnight of Folly. 

•soon adjust itself properly. In that case the 
author’s reputation would be his own property. 
So soon as he had made an audience his manu- 
scripts would command a certain price. If one 
publisher would not pay enough for it another 
would. As the method now is, it makes little 
difference whether the author have a reputation 
or not. Indeed most publishers prefer to pub- 
lish the novels, for example, of clever tyros, 
because these fledglings are so proud of seeing 
themselves in print that they never think of 
•questioning copyright statements. Eleven hun- 
dred and forty copies usually will delight them 
almost beyond endurance. (Laughter and ap- 
plause). Go look at the book lists of the pub- 
lishers and you will feel the truth of what I have 
;said. 

“ Now let me ask you if you can give, or if 
any publisher can give one solitary honest rea- 
son why the publishing business should not be 
put upon a cash basis — a manuscript for so much 
money? The publisher controls his own busi- 
ness, he knows every nook and corner, every 
leaf and every line of it, and he should be able 
to say, just as the corn-merchant does, I will 
give you so much, to which the author would 
say : I will take it, or I will not take it. But 
what is the good of standing here and arguing? 
You believe every word I speak, but you don’t 
expect to profit by it. You will go on gambling 
at the publisher’s faro table just as long as he 
will smile and deal the cards. Some of these 


97 


A Fortnight oj Folly. 

days you will win, you iliink. Poor deluded 
wretches, go on and die in the faith ! ” 

No sooner had Ferris ended than Lucas the 
historian arose and expressed grave doubts as 
to the propriety of the address. He Avas decid- 
edly of the opinion that authors could not afford 
to express themselves so freely and, if he must 
say it, recklessly. How could Mr. Ferris sub- 
stantiate by proof any of the damaging allega- 
tions he had made against publishers of high 
standing? What Mr. Ferris had said might be 
strictly true, but the facts were certainly, verv- 
hard to come at, he thought. He hoped that 
Mr. Ferris’s address would not be reported to the 
press (here he glanced appealingly at Miss 
Crabb), at least not as the sense of the meeting. 
Such a thing would, in his opinion, be liable to 
work a great harm to all present. He felt sure 
that the publishers would resent the whole 
thing as malicious and libellous. 

Throughout the audience there was a nervous 
stirring, a looking at one another askance. It 
was as if a cold wave had flowed over them. 
Nobody had anything further to say, and it was 
a great relief when Dufour moved an adjourn- 
ment sine die^ which was carried by a vote that 
suggested a reserve of power. Every face in 
the audience, with the exception of Dufour’s, 
wore a half- guilty look, and everybody crept 
silently out of the room. 

7 


98 


A Fortnight of Folly, 


XV. 

It caused quite a commotion on Mt. Boab 
when Bartley Hubbard and Miss Henrietta 
Stackpole, newspaper people from Boston, 
arrived at Hotel Helicon. Miss Stackpole had 
just returned from Europe, and Bartley Hub- 
bard had run down from Boston for a week to 
get some points for his .paper. She had met 
Mr. Henry James on the continent and Hubbard 
had dined with Mr. Howells just before leaving 
Boston. 

Ho two persons in all the world would have 
been less welcome among the guests at the hotel, 
just then, than were these professional reporters. 
Of course everybody tried to give them a cordial 
greeting, but they were classed along with Miss 
Orabb as dangerous characters whom it would 
be folly to snub. Miss Moyne was in down- 
right terror of them, associating the thought of 
tnem with those ineffable pictures of herself 
which were still appearing at second and third 
hand in the “patent insides” of the country 
journals, but she was very good to them, and 
Miss Stackpole at once attached herself to her 
unshakably. Hubbard did likewise with little 
Mrs. Philpot, who amused him mightily with 
her strictures upon analytical realism in fiction. 

“I do think that Mr. Howells treated you 
most shamefully,” she said to him. “ He had 
no right to represent you as a disagreeable per- 
son who was cruel to his wife and who had no 
moral stamina.” 


99 


A Fortnight of Folly, 

Hubbard laughed as one who hears an absurd 
joke. “Oh, Howells and I have an understand^ 
ing. We are really great friends,” he said. “I 
sat to him for my portrait and I really think he* 
flattered me. I managed to keep him from see- 
ing some of my ugliest lines.” 

“How you are not quite sincere,” said Mrs; 
Philpot, glancing over him from head to foot. 
“You are not so bad as he made you out to b^-. 
It’s one of Mr. Howells’s hobbies to represeut 
men as rather flabby nonentities and women as 
invalids or dolls.” 

“ He’s got the men down fine,” replied Hub- 
bard, “but I guess he is rather light on women. 
You will admit, however, that he dissects fem- 
inine meanness and inconsequence with a deft 
turn.” 

“He makes fun of women,” said Mrs. Philpot,. 
a little testily, “he caricatures them, wreaks his 
humor on them ; but you know very well that 
he misrepresents them even in his most serious 
and qiLOsi truthful moods.” 

Hubbard laughed, and there was something 
essentially vulgar in the notes of the laugh. 
Mrs. Philpot admitted this mentally, and she 
found herself shrinking from his steadfast but 
almost conscienceless eyes. 

“I imagine I shouldn’t be as bad a husband 
as he did me into, but — ” 

Mrs. Philpot interrupted him with a start and 
a little cry. 

“Dear me I and aren’t you married?” she 


100 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

asked in exclamatory deprecation of what his 
words had implied. 

He laughed again very coarsely and looked 
at her with eyes that almost lured. “ Mar- 
ried ! ” he exclaimed, “ do I look like a marry- 
ing man? A newspaper man can’t afford to 
marry.” 

“ How strange , ” reflected Mrs. Philpot, 
how funny, and Mr. Howells calls himself a 
realist! ” 

Kealist I ” laughed Hubbard, “ why he does 
not know enough about the actual world to be 
competent to purchase a family horse. He’s a 
capital fellow, good and true and kind-hearted, 
but what does he know about affairs? He 
doesn’t even know how to flatter women I ” 

“ How absurd I ” exclaimed little Mrs. Phil- 
pot, but Hubbard could not be sure for the 
life of him just what she meant the expression 
to characterize. 

“ And you like Mr. Howells ? ” she inquired. 

“ Like him I everybody likes him,” he cor- 
dially said. 

“Well, you are quite different from Miss 
Crabb. She hates Maurice Thompson for putting 
her into a story.” 

“ Oh, well,” said Hubbard, indifferently, 
“women are not like men. They take life 
more seriously. If Thompson had had more 
experience he would not have tampered with a 
newspaper woman. He’s got the whole crew 
down on him. Miss Stackpole hates him 
almost as fiercely as she hates Henry James.” 


A Fortnight of Folly. igi 

“ I don’t blame her,” exclaimed Mrs. Philpot, 
“ it’s mean and contemptible for men to carica- 
ture women.” 

“Oh, I don’t know,” yawned Hubbard, “it 
all goes in a lifetime.” 

At this opportune moment Miss Crabb and 
Miss Stackpole joined them, coming arm in 
arm, Miss Crabb looking all the more sallow 
and slender in comparison with the plump, 
well-fed appearance of her companion. 

“May I introduce you to Miss Crabb of the 
Eingville Star\ Mr. Hubbard,” Miss Stackpole 
asked, in a high but by no means rich voice, as 
she fastened her steady, button-like eyes on 
Mrs. Philpot. 

Habbard arose lazily and went through the 
process of introduction perfunctorily, giving 
Miss Crabb a sweeping but indifferent glance. 

“There’s an impromptu pedestrian excursion 
on hand,” said Miss Stackpole, “ and I feel 
bound to go. One of the gentlemen has discov- 
ered a hermit’s cabin down a ravine near here, 
and he offers to personally conduct a party to 
it. You will go, Mr. Hubbard ? ” 

“Go! I should remark that I will. You 
don’t get a scoop of that item, I assure you.” 

Miss Stackpole was a plump and rather 
pretty young woman, fairly well dressed in 
drab drapery. She stood firmly on her feet and 
had an air of self-reliance and self-control in 
strong contrast with the fussy, nervous manner 
of Miss Crabb. 

Mrs. Philpot, surveyed the two young women 


102 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

with that comprehensive, critical glance which 
takes in everything that is visible, and quickly 
enough slie made up her comparison and esti- 
mate of them. 

Slie decided that Miss Crabb had no style, no 
savoir faire^ no repose ; but then Miss Stackpole 
was forward, almost impudent in appearance, 
and her greater ease of manner was really the 
ease that comes of a long training in intrusive- 
ness, and of rubbing against an older civiliza- 
tion. She felt quite distinctly the decided dash 
of vulgarity in the three newspaper representa- 
tives before her, and she could not help sus- 
pecting that it would not be safe to judge the 
press reporters by these examples. 

The question arose in her mind whether 
after all Howells and Henry James and Maurice 
Thompson had acted fairly in taking these as 
representative newspaper people. 

She had met a great many newspaper people 
and had learned to like them as a class ; she 
had many good and helpful friends among 
them. 

Unconsciously she was showing to all present 
that she was dissecting the three reporters. Her 
unfavorable opinion of them slowly took expres- 
sion in her tell-tale face. Hot that she wholly 
disliked or distrusted them ; she really pitied 
them. How could they be content to live such 
a life, dependent upon what they could make 
by meddling, so to speak ? 

Then too, she felt a vague shame, a chagrin, 
a regret that real people must be put into works 


A Fortnight of Folly. 103 

of fiction witla all the seamy side of their natures 
turned out to the world’s eye. 

“ We’re in for it,” exclaimed Hubbard, “ Mrs. 
Phil pot is making a study of us as a group. 
See the dreaming look in her eyes ! ” 

“ Oh, no I she never studies anybody or 
anything,” said Miss Crabb. “ Poor little woman, 
real life is a constant puzzle to her, and she 
makes not the slightest effort to understand it.” 

Hubbard and Miss Stackpole glanced cur- 
iously at each other and then at Miss Crabb. 
Evidently their thought was a common one. 

XYI. 

The pedestrian excursion spoken of by Miss 
Stackpole promised to be an enjoyable affair to 
those of the Helicon guests who could venture 
upon it. A writer of oddly entertaining and 
preposterously impossible short stories, John B. 
Cattleton, had been mousing among the ravines 
of Mt. Boab, and had stumbled upon what he 
described as a “ very obscure little cabin, jam- 
med under a cliff* in an angle of the canon and 
right over a bright stream of cold, pure spring- 
water. It’s a miserably picturesque and for- 
lornly prepossessing place,” he went on in his 
droll way, “ where all sorts of engaging ghosts 
and entertaining ogres might be supposed to 
congregate at midnight. I didn’t go quite 
down to it, but I was near enough to it to 
make out its main features, and I saw the 
queerest being imaginable poking around the 
premises. A veritable hermit, I should call 


104 A Fortnight of Folly. 

him, as old as the rocks themselves. His dress 
was absurdly old-fashioned, a caricature of the 
uniform of our soldier sires of revolutionary 
renown. A long spike-tailed blue coat with 
notable brass buttons, a triangular hat somewhat 
bell-crowned and tow or cotton trousers. Shirt? 
Vest? Yes, if I remember well they were of 
copperas homespun. His hair and beard were 
white, fine and thin, hanging in tags and wisps as 
fiufiy as lint. I sat upon a rock in the shadow of 
a cedar tree and watched his queer manoeuvres for 
a good while. All his movements were furtive 
and peculiar, like those of a shy, wild beast.” 

“It’s the Prophet of the Smoky Mountain,” 
said Miss Crabb in an earnest stage whisper. 
“ He’s Craddock’s material, we can’t touch 
him.” 

“ Touch him ! I’ll interview him on dialect 
in politics,” said Hubbard, “ and get his views 
on sex in genius.” 

“ I should like a sketch of his life. There 
must be a human interest to serve as straw for 
my brick,” remarked Miss Stackpole. “The 
motive that induced him to become a hermit, 
and all that.” 

Miss Crabb dared not confess that she desired 
a sketch of the old man for the newspaper syn- 
dicate, so she merely drummed on her front 
teeth with her pencil. 

Dufour joined the pedestrian party with 
great enthusiasm, having dressed himself for 
the occasion in a pair of tennis trousers, a blue 
flannel shirt, a loose jacket and a shooting cap. 


A Fortnight of Folly, 105 

His shoes were genuine alpine foot-gear witli 
short spikes in their heels and soles. 

^“Lead on Cattletou,” he cried jovially, “ and 
let our motto be, ‘ On to the hut of Friar 
Tuck ’ ! ” 

“Good,” answered Cattleton in like spirit, 
“ and you shall be my lieutenant, come, walk 
beside me.” 

“ Thank you, from the bottom of my heart,” 
replied Dufour, “ but I cannot accept. I have 
contracted to be Miss Moyne’s servant instead.” 

That was a gay procession filing away from 
Hotel Helicon through the thin forest that 
fringed one shoulder of stately Mt. Boa^. Cat- 
tleton led the column, flinging back from time 
to time his odd sayings and preposterous con- 
ceits. 

The day was delightfully cool with a steady 
wind running over the mountain and eddying 
in the sheltered coves where the ferns were 
thick and tall. In the sky were a few pale 
clouds slowly vanishing, whilst some broad- 
pinioned buzzards wheeled round and round 
above the blue -green abyss of the valley. There 
were sounds of a vague, dreamy sort abroad in 
the woods, like the whisperings and laughter of 
legions of invisible beings. Everybody felt 
exhilarated and buoyant, tramping gaily away 
to the hut of the hermit. 

At a certain point Cattleton commanded a 
halt, and pointing out the entrance to the ravine, 
said : 

“How, good friends, we must have perfect 


io6 A Fortnight of Folly. 

silence during the descent, or our visit will be 
all in vain. Furthermore, the attraction of 
gravitation demands that, in going down, we 
must preserve our uprightness, else our pro- 
gress may be facilitated to an alarming degree, 
and our advent at the hut be far from becomingly 
dignified.” 

Like a snake, flecked with touches of gay 
color, the procession crawled down tho ravine, 
the way becoming steeper and more fc<)rtuous 
at every step. Thicker and thicker am I thicker 
grew the trees, saving where the rook broke 
forth from the soil, and closer drew the zig-zags 
of the barely possible route. Cattleton silenced 
every voice and rebuked every person who 
showed signs of weakening. 

“It’s just a few steps farther,” he whispered 
back from his advanced position, “ don’t make 
the least sound.” 

But the ravine proved, upon this second 
descent much more difficult and dangerous than 
it had appeared to Cattleton at first, and it was 
with the most heroic exertions that he finally 
led the party down to the point whence he had 
viewed the cabin. By this time the column 
was pressing upon him and he could not stop. 
Down he went, faster and faster, barely able to 
keep his feet, now sliding, now clutching a tree 
or rock, with the breathless and excited line of 
followers gathering dangerous momentum be- 
hind him. 

It was too late now to command silence or to 
control the company in any way. An ava- 


A Fortnight oj Folly. 107 

lanche of little stones, loosened by scrambling 
feet, swept past him and went leaping on down 
below. He heard Miss Moyne utter a little 
scream of terror that mingled with many excla- 
mations from both men and women, and then 
he lost his feet and began to slide. Down he 
sped and down sped the party after him, till in 
a cataract of mightily frightened, but unharmed 
men and women, they all went over a little 
precipice and landed in a scattered heap on a 
great bed of oak leaves that the winds had 
drifted against the rock. 

A few moments of strange silence followed, 
then everybody sprang up, disheveled and red- 
faced, to look around and see what was the 
matter. 

They found themselves close to the long, low 
cabin, from under which flowed a stream of 
water. A little column of smoke was wander- 
ing out of a curious clay chimney. Beside the 
low door- way stood a long, deep trough filled 
with water in which a metal pipe was coiled 
fantastically. Two earthen jugs with cob stop- 
pers sat hard by. A sourish smell assaulted 
their sense and a faint spirituous flavor bur- 
dened the air. 

Cattleton, who was first upon his feet, shook 
himself together and drolly remarked: 

“We have arrived in good order, let’s inter- 
view the ’* 

Just then rushed forth from the door the old 
man of the place, who halted outside and 
snatched from its rack on the wall a long tin 


io8 A Fortnight of Folly. 

horn, which he proceeded to blow vigorously,, 
the echoes prowling through the woods and 
over the foot-hills and scampering far away up 
and down the valley. 

Not a soul present ever could forget that 
sketch, the old man with his shrunken legs, 
bent and wide apart, his arms akimbo as he^ 
leaned far back and held up that wailing, howl- 
ing, bellowing horn, and his long coat-tail 
almost touching the ground, whilst his fantastic 
hat quivered in unison with the strain he was 
blowing. How his shriveled cheeks puffed out, 
and how his eyes appeared to be starting from 
their bony sockets ! 

“ That is what I call a fitting reception,”’ 
said Cattleton, gazing at the trumpeter. 

“See here,” exclaimed Crane with evident 
excitement, “ I smell whisky ! This ” 

“ Hyer ! what d’ye mean hyer, you all a 
cornin’ down hyer ? ” broke forth a wrathful voice, 
and Wesley Tolliver rushed with melodramatic; 
fierceness upon the scene. 

“ Oh ! I — I — wa — want to g — go home ! ” cried 
little Mrs. Philpot, clutching Bartley Hubbard’s 
arm. 

“So do I,” said he with phlegmatic clever- 
ness. “I should like to see my mother. I’m 
feeling a little lonely and ” 

“ What upon yearth do this yer mean, any- 
how ? ” thundered Tolliver. “ Who invited you 
all down yer, tell me thet, will ye? ” 

“Oh, Mr. Tolliver, Mr. Tolliver!” exclaimed 


A Fortnight of Folly. 1 09 . 

Miss Crabb, rushing upon him excitedly, “ I’m 
50 glad you are here I ” 

“ Well, I’ll her dorged I ” he ejaculated, “ you 
down hyer again ! W ell, I never seed the like 
afore in all my born days.” 

He gazed at first one and then another of the 
party, and a sudden light flashed into his 
face. 

“ Well I’ll ber dorged ef ther whole kepoodle 
of ’em hain’t done jest gone and tumbled olf n 
the mounting an’ jest rolled down hyer ! ” 

“ You’re a very accurate reasoner, my friend,” 
said Cattleton, trying to get his hat into shape. 
“ I think we touched at two or three points as 
we came down, however.” 

About this time four or five more mountain- 
eers appeared bearing guns and looking sav- 
age. 

“ Bandits,” said Miss Stackpole with a shud- 
der. - 

“ Moonshiners,” muttered Crane. 

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mr. Hubbard, da 
t — t — take m — me home ! ” wailed Mrs. Philpot. 

“I should be delighted,” said Hubbard, his 
voice concealing tlie uneasiness he felt. “In- 
ched I should.” 

More men appeared and at the same time a, 
roll of thunder tumbled across the darkening 
sky. A sudden mountain storm had arisen. 

The pedestrians found themselves surrounded 
by a line of grim and silent men who appeared 
to be waiting for orders from Tolliver. . 

A few large drops of rain come slanting down 


no A Fortnight of Folly. 

from tlie advancing fringe of the sable-cloud, 
and again the thunder bounded across the 
heavens. 

“ I guess you’d better invite us in,” suggested 
Cattleton, turning to tlie old man, who stood 
leaning on his tin horn. “ The ladies will get 
wet.” - 

“ I say, Cattleton,” called out Bartley Hub- 
bard, “ if a fellow only had a little supply of 
Stockton’s negative gravity he could ameliorate 
his condition, don’t you think? ” 

“ Yes, I’d like to fall up hill just now.* The 
oxcitement would be refreshing.” 

There came a spiteful dash of rain and a flurry 
of wind. 

“ You’ns had better go inter the still -house,” 
said Tolliver. “Hit air goin’ ter rain yearlin’ 
oalves. Go right erlong in, ye sha’n’t be hurt.” 

Another gush of rain enforced the invitation, 
and tliey all scrambled into the cabin pell-mell, 
glad of the relief from a strain that had become 
almost unbearable to some of them, but they 
stared at each other when they found the door 
closed and securely locked on the outside. 

“ Prisoners ! ” cried some one whose voice was 
drowned by a deafening crash of thunder and a 
mighty flood of rain that threatened to crush in 
the rickety roof of the house. 

“ The treacherous villain ! ” exclaimed Dufour, 
speaking of Tolliver and holding Miss Moyne’s 
hand. The poor girl was so frightened that it 
was a comfort to her to have her hand held. 

“ How grand, how noble it is in Mr. Tolliver 


Ill 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

and his friends,” said Miss Crabb, “ to stand out 
there in the rain and let us have the shelter I I 
never saw a more virile and thoroughly unselfish 
man than he is. He is one of Nature’s unshorn 
heroes, a man of the ancient god-like race.” 

Mrs. Nancy Jones Black gave the yoimg 
woman a look of profound contempt. 

Then a crash of thunder, wind, and rain scat- 
tered everybody’s thoughts. 

XYII. 

The storm was wild enough, but of short 
duration, and it came to its end as suddenly as 
it had begun. As the black cloud departed 
from the sky, the darkness, which had been 
almost a solid inside the still-house, was pierced 
by certain lines of mild light coming through 
various chinks in the walls and roof. Our 
friends examined one another curiously, as if to 
be sure that it was not all a dream. 

Cattleton found himself face to face with a 
demure-looking young man, whom he at once 
recognized as Harry Punner, a writer of deli- 
cious verses and editor of a rollicking humorous 
journal at New York. 

Hello, Hal! you here?” 'he cried. “"Well 
how does it strike your funny bone? It insists 
upon appearing serious to me.” 

“ I’m smothering for a whiff of fresh air,” 
said Punner, in a very matter-of-fact tone. 
“ Can’t we raise a window or something? ” 

“ The only window visible to the naked eye,” 
said Cattleton, “ is already raised higher than I 


112 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

•can reach,” and he pointed to a square hole in 
the wall about seven and a-haiF feet above the 
iground and very near the roof. 

Crane went about in the room remarking that 
the aroma floating in the air was the bouquet 
of the very purest and richest copper-distilled 
corn whisky and that if he could find it he was 
quite sure that a sip of it would prove very 
refreshing under the peculiar circumstances of 
the case, an observation which called forth from 
Mrs. Nancy Jones Black a withering temper- 
ance reprimand. 

“ As the presiding officer of the WomaTfs 
Prohibizion Promulgation Society I cannot let 
such a remark pass without condemning it. It 
this really is a liquor establishment I desire to 
be let out of it forthwith.” 

‘‘So do I!” exclaimed little Mrs. Philpot 
with great vehemence. “Open the door Mr. 
Hubbard, please.” 

Hubbard went to the door and finding that 
U was constructed to open outwardly, gave it a 
shove with all his might. There was a short 
tussle and he staggered back. 

“ Why don’t you push it open ? ” fretfully 
exclaimed Mrs. Nancy Jones Black. 

“The gentlemen outside object, for reasons 
not stated,” was the rather stolidly spoken 
answer. 

Cattleton had taken off his hat and was 
going about through the company soliciting 
handkerchiefs. 


”3 


A Fortnight of Folly » 

‘‘ Drop them in, drop tiiem in,” lie urged, “I 
need all of them that I can get.” 

He offered his hat as a contribution box as 
he spoke, and nearly every-one gave a handker- 
chief, without in the least suspecting his pur- 
pose. 

When he had collected a round dozen, Cat- 
tleton crammed them all down in the crown of 
his hat which he then put on his head. 

“Now Hal,” he said, addressing Punner, 
“give me a boost and I’ll make an observation 
through that window.” 

The rain was now entirely ended and the wind 
had fallen still. 

With Punner’s help Cattleton got up to the 
window and poked out his head. 

“ Git back ther’ ! ” growled a vicious voice^ 
and at the same time the dull sound of a heavy 
blow was followed by the retreat of Cattleton 
from the window to the floor in a great hurry. 

Upon top of his hat was a deep trench made 
by a club. 

“The handkerchiefs did their duty nobly,” 
he remarked. “Let everybody come forward 
and identify his property.” 

“ What did you see ? ” asked Punner. 

“ A giant with an oak tree in his hand and 
murder in his eye,” said Cattleton, busily select- 
ing and returning the handkerchiefs. “ This 
eleemosynary padding was all that saved me. 
The blow was aimed at my divine intellect.” 

“ See here,” cried Peck, in great earnest, 
“this is no joking matter. We’re in the power 
8 


1 14 A Fortnight of Folly. 

of a set of mountain moonshiners, and may be 
murdered in cold blood. We’d better do some- 
thing.” 

Crane had prowled around until he had found 
a small jug of fragrant mountain dew whisky, 
which he was proceeding to taste in true Ken- 
tucky style, when a gaunt form rose in a comer 
of the room, and tottering forward seized the jug 
and took it out of his hand. 

“Ko ye don’t, sonny, no ye don’t! This yer 
mounting jew air not ever’body’s licker ’at 
wants it. Kot by er half er mile at the littlest 
calc’lation 1 ” 

Miss Crabb made a note. Crane gazed pathet- 
ically at the fantastic old man before him, and 
brushed his handkerchief across his lips, as if 
from habit, as he managed to say : 

“I meant no undue liberty, I assure you. 
That whisky is ” 

“Overpowerin’,” interrupted the old man, 
taking a sip from the vessel. “Yes, I don’t 
blame ye fur a wantin’ of it, but this yer licker 
air mine.” 

“ Up in Kentucky,” said Crane, “we are proud 
to offer ” 

“ Kaintucky ! did ye say ole Kaintuck? Air 
ye from ther’, boy ? ” 

The octogenarian leaned forward as he spoke 
and gazed at Crane with steadfast, rheumy 
eyes. 

Miss Henrietta Stackpole came forward to 
hear what was to follow, her instinct telling her 


A Fortnight of Folly. 115 

that a point of human interest was about to be 
reached. 

“Yes,” said Crane, “I was bom and reared 
on Lulbegrud creek.” 

“ Lulbegrud ! ” 

“Yes.” 

“ How fur fom Wright’s mill? ” 

“ Close by, at Kiddville,” said Crane. 

“Ye ’member Easton’s Springs close by an’ 
Pilot Knob away off in the distance? ” 

“Very well, indeed, and Guoff’s. pond. 

“ Boy, what mought yer name be? ” 

“ Crane.” 

“ Crane ! ” 

“Yes.” 

“ Well, I’ll ber dorg ! ” 

The old man stood gazing and grinning at 
Crane for some moments, and then added : 

“ What’s yer pap’s name ? ” 

“ Eliphas Crane.” 

“ ’Liphas Crane yore pap I ” 

“Yes.” 

“ Child, I air yer pap’s uncle.” 

“ What! ” 

“ I air Peter Job Crane.” 

. “You!” 

“ Sartin es anything.” 

“Are you my father’s uncle Peter?” 

“ I air yer pap’s uncle Pete.” 

“ How strange ! ” 

Miss Stackpole did not permit a word, a look, 
or a shade of this interview to escape her. She 
now turned to Bartley Hubbard and said ; 


II 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

“We Americaiis are the victims of hetero- 
geneous consanguinity. Such an incident as 
this could not happen in England. It will be a 
long time before we can get rid of our ancestors.’* 

“ Yes,” assented Hubbard, nonchalantly, “ Yer 
pap’s uncle certainly is a large factor in Amer- 
ican life.” 

“ How many men did you see when you looked 
out ? ” Peck inquired, addressing Cattleton. 

“ I saw only one, but he was a monster,” was 
the ready reply. “ It’s no use brooding over try- 
ing to escape by force. W e’re utterly helpless, 
and that jolt on my head has rendered me unfit 
for diplomatic efforts.” 

“ What do you suppose they will do with 
us ? ” 

“ They won’t dare let us go.” 

“Why?” 

“ They’d be afraid that we would report their 
illicit distillery.” 

“ Ah, I see.” 

The affair began to take on a very serious 
and gloomy aspect, and the room was growing 
oppressively hot, owing to the presence of a 
a small but energetic furnace that glowed under 
a sighing boiler. Outside, with the clearing sky 
and refreshed air, there arose a clamor of bird- 
song in the dripping trees. Under the floor the 
spring-stream gurgled sweetly. 

“Ye ’member Abbott’s still house on ole 
Lulbegrud?” said the old man, pursuing his 
reminisences, after he had permitted his grand- 


A Fortnight of Folly. 117 

nepliew to taste the “ mounting jew,” “an’ Dan 
Rankin’s ole bob- tail boss ? ” 

“Yerj well, indeed,” responded Crane, “ and 
Billy Pace’s blackberry fields where I picked 
berries in summer and chased rabbits in winter.” 

“ Take er nother drop o’ the jyful juice, boy, 
fur the mem’ry o’ ole Kaintuck ! ” 

“ Oh dear I but isn’t it incomparably awful ? ” 
exclaimed Mrs. Nancy Jones Black, gazing in 
horrified fascination upon the two Kentuckians, 
as they bowed to each other and drank alter- 
nately from the little jug. 

“ Characteristic Southern scene not used by 
Craddock,” murmured Miss Crabb, making a 
whole page of a single note. 

“ Don’t this yere liquor taste 0’ one thing an’ 
smell o’ another an’ jes’ kinder git ter the low- 
est p’int o’ yer appetite ? ” continued Crane’s 
great uncle Peter. 

“ Delicious beyond compare,” responded the 
young man, drinking again, “ it is nectar of the 
gods.” 

Mrs. Nancy Jones Black groaned, but could 
not withdraw her eyes from the scene. 

“ Good deal like ole times down to Abbott’s 
still-house on Lulbegrud, boy,” the old man 
suggested, “ ye don’t forgit erbout Dan Rankin’s 
mule a-ki ekin’ ole man Homback’s hat off? ” 

The poet laughed retrospectively and mopped 
his glowing face with his handkerchief. The 
heat from the furnace and the stimulus of the 
excellent beverage were causing him to feel the 
need of fresh air. 


Il8 A Fortnight of Folly. 

Indeed, everybody was beginning to pant. 
Miss Moyne was so overcome with excitement 
and with the heat of tbe place, that she was 
ready to faint, when tbe door was flung open and 
Tolliver appeared. A rush of sweet cool air, 
flooding the room, revived her, just as she was 
sinking into Dufour’s arms. 

XYIII. 

Authors who have added the vice of elocu- 
tion to the weakness of dialect verse-making, are 
often at a loss for a sympathetic audience. 
Whilst it is true that literary people are apt to 
bear with a good deal of patience the mutually 
offered inflictions incident to meeting one 
another, they draw the line at dialect recita- 
tions ; and, as a rule, stubbornly refuse to be 
bored with a fantastic rendition of “ When 
Johnny got spanked by a mule,” or “Livery- 
stable Bob,” or “ Samantha’s Courtin’,” or “ Over 
the Eidge to the Pest-house,” no matter how 
dear a friend may offer the scourge. Circum- 
stances alter cases, however, and although 
neither Carleton, nor Eiley, nor yet Burdette, 
nor Bill Xye (those really irresistible and wholly 
delightful humorists), had come to Hotel Heli- 
con, there was a certain relief for those of the 
guests who had not joined the luckless pedes- 
trians, in hearing Miss Amelia Lotus Hebeker 
recite a long poem written in New Jersey 
patois. 

Miss Nebeker was very hard of hearing, 
almost stone deaf, indeed, which affliction lent 


A Fortnight of Folly, 119 

a pathetic effect even to her humor. She was 
rather stout, decidedly short, and had a way of 
making wry faces with a view to adding com- 
icality to certain turns of her New Jersey 
phraseology, and yet she was somewhat of a 
hore at times. Possibly she wished to read too 
often and sometimes upon very unsuitable occa- 
sions. It was Mrs. Bridges who once said that, 
if the minister at a funeral should ask some one 
to say a few appropriate words. Miss Nebeker, 
if present, would immediately clear her throat 
and begin reciting “ A Jerseyman’s Jewsharp.” 
“ And if she once got started you’d never be 
able to stop her, for she’s as deaf as an adder.” 

It was during the rainstorm, while those of 
the guests who had not gone to the heimit’s 
hut with Cattleton, were in the cool and spa- 
cious parlor of the hotel, that something was 
said about Charles Dickens reading from his 
own works. Strangely enough, although the 
remark was uttered in a low key and at some 
distance from Miss Nebeker, she responded at 
once with an offer to give them a new render- 
ing of The JerseymarCs Jewsharp, Lucas, the 
historian, objected vigorously, but she insisted 
upon interpreting his words and gestures as em- 
phatic applause of her proprosition. She arose 
while he was saying : 

“ Oh now, that’s too much, we’re tired of the 
jangling of that old harp ; give us a rest ! ” 

This unexpected and surprising slang from so. 
grave and dignified a man set everybody to 
laughing. Miss Nebeker bowed in smiling 


120 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

acknowledgement of what appeared to her to be 
a flattering anticipation of her humor, and tak- 
ing her manuscript from some hiding-place in 
her drapery, made a grimace and began to read. 
Mrs. Philpot’s cat, in the absence of its mistress, 
had taken up with the elocutionist and now 
came to rub and purr around her feet while she 
recited. This was a small matter, but in school 
or church or lecture-hall, small matters attract 
attention. The fact that the cat now and again 
mewed plaintively set some of the audience to 
smiling and even to laughing. 

Such apparent approval of her new rendition 
thrilled Miss Nebeker to her heart’s core. Her 
voice deepened, her intonations caught the spirit 
of her mood, and she read wildly well. 

Every one who has even a smattering of the 
patois current in New Jersey, will understand 
how effective it might be made in the .larynx 
of a cunning elocutionist ; and then whoever has 
had the delicious experience of hearing a genu- 
ine Jerseyman play on the jewsharp will natur- 
ally jump to a correct conclusion concerning 
the pathos of the subject which Miss Nebeker 
had in hand. She felt its influence and threw 
all her power into it. Heavy as she was, she 
arose on her tip-toes at the turning point of the 
storj^ and gesticulated vehemently. 

The cat, taken by surprise, leaped aside a pace 
or two and glared in a half-frightened way, 
with each separate hair on its tail set stiffly. 
Of course there was more laughter which the 
reader took as applause. 


A Fortnight of Folly. 121 

“ A brace of cats ! ” exclaimed the historian. 
“ A brace of cats 1 ” 

Nobody knew what he meant, but the laugh- 
ing increased, simply for the reason that there 
was nothing to laugh at. 

Discovering pretty soon that Miss Nebeker 
really meant no harm by her manoeuvres, the cat 
went back to rub and purr at her feet. Then Miss 
Nebeker let down her heel on the cat’s tail, at 
the same time beginning with the pathetic part 
of The JerseymarCs Jewsharp. 

The unearthly squall that poor puss gave forth 
was wholly lost on the excited elocutionist, but 
it quite upset the audience, who, not wishing 
to appear rude, used their handkerchiefs freely. 

Miss Nebeker paused to give full effect to a 
touching line. 

The cat writhed and rolled and clawed the air 
and wailed like a lost spirit in its vain endeavor 
to free its tail ; but Miss Nebeker, all uncon- 
scious of the situation, and seeing her hearers 
convulsed and wiping tears from their faces, 
redoubled her elocutionary artifices and poured 
incomparable feeling into her voice. 

Suddenly the tortured and writhing animal 
uttered a scream of blood-curdling agony and 
lunged at Miss Nebeker’s ankles with tooth and 
claw. 

She was in the midst of the passage where 
the dying Jerseyman hfts himself on his elbow 
and calls for his trusty Jewsharp: 

“ Gi’ me my juice-harp, Sarah Ann ” she 

was saying, when of a sudden she screamed 


122 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

louder than the cat and bounded into the air, 
sending her manuscript in fluttering leaves all 
over the room. 

The cat, with level tail and fiery eyes, sailed 
through the door- way into the hall, and went as 
if possessed of a devil, bounding up the stairway 
to Mrs. Philpot’s room. 

Congratulations were in order, and Lucas 
insisted upon bellowing in Miss Nebeker’s ear 
his appreciation of the powerful effect produced, 
by the last scene in the little drama. 

“ If our friends who are out in this rain are 
finding anything half as entertaining,” he thun- 
dered, “ they needn’t mind the drenching.” 

“ But I’m bitten, I’m scratched, I’m hurt ! ’ 
she exclaimed. 

Lucas suddenly realized the brutality of his 
attitude, and hastened to rectify it by collecting 
the leaves of her manuscript and handing them 
to her, 

“I beg pardon,” he said sincerely, “I hope 
you are not hurt much.” 

“ Just like a cat,” she cried, “ always under 
somebody’s feet ! I do despise them ! ” 

With a burning face and trembling hands 
she swiftly rearranged the manuscript and 
assuming the proper attitude asked the audience 
to be seated again. 

“ I am bitten and scratched quite severely,” 
she said, “ and am suffering great pain, but if 
you will resume your places I will begin over 
again.” 


123 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

“ Call that cat back, then, quick ! ” exclaimed 
Lucas, “ it’s the star performer in the play.” 

She proceeded forthwith, setting out on a new 
journey through the tortuous ways of the poem, 
and held up very well to the end. What she 
called New Jersey patois was a trifle flat when 
put into verse and she lacked the polished buf- 
foonery of a successful dialect reader, wherefore 
she failed to get along very successfully with 
her audience in the absence of the cat ; still the 
reading served to kill a good deal of time, by a 
mangling process. 

The storm was over long ago when she had 
finished, and the sun was flooding the valley 
vdth golden splendor. Along the far away 
mountain ridges some slanting wisps of whitish 
mist sailed slowly, like aerial yachts riding dark 
blue billows. The foliage of the trees, lately 
dusky and drooping, twinkled vividly with a 
green that was almost dazzling, and the air was 
deliciously fresh and fragrant. 

Everybody went out on the veranda for a 
turn and a deep breath. 

The mail had arrived and by a mistake a 
bundle of letters bearing the card of George 
Dunkirk & Co., and addressed to “George Dun- 
kirk, Esq., Hotel Helicon, room 24,” was handed 
to Lucas. 

The historian gazed at the superscription, 
adjusted his glasses and gazed again, and slowly 
the truth crept into his mind. There were ten 
or fifteen of the letters. Evidently some o^ 
them, as Lucas’s experience suggested, had alien 


1 24 A Fortnight of Folly. 

letters inclosed within their envelopes, and thus 
forwai ded by the mailing clerk of the firm had at 
last come to the senior partner at room 24. 

“ Gaspard Dufour, indeed 1 ” Lucas exclaimed 
inwardly. “George Dunkirk, rather. This is 
a pretty kettle of fish ! ” 

He sent the letters up to room 24, to await 
the return of their proper recipient, and fell to 
reflecting upon the many, very many and very 
insulting things that he and nearly all the rest 
of the hotel guests as well had said in Dufour’s 
hearing about publishers in general and about 
George Dunkirk & Co., in particular. Ilis face 
burned with the heat of the retrospect, as he 
recalled such phrases as “ sleek thief,” “ manip- 
ulator of copy-right statements,” “ Cadmean 
wolf” “ghoul of literary grave-yards,” and a 
hundred others, applied with utter unrestraint 
and bandied around, while George Dunkirk was 
sitting by listening to it all I 

He called Ferris to him and imparted his dis- 
covery in a. stage whisper. 

“The dickens!” was all that gentleman 
could say, as the full text of his address of the 
other evening rushed upon him. 

“ It is awkward, devilish awkward,” remarked 
Lucas, wiping his glasses and nervously read- 
justing them. 

A few minutes later two men rode up to the 
hotel. One of them was a very quiet-looking 
fellow who dryly stated that he was the high 
sheriff of Mt. Boab county. 


A Fortnight of Folly. 


125 


XTX. 

Meantime down the ravine in the obscure 
little still-house our pedestrians were held in 
durance vile by Tolliver and his obedient 
moon-shiners. 

It was a puzzling situation to all concerned. 
Far from wishing or intending to harm his 
prisoners, Tolliver still could not see his way 
clear to setting them at liberty. . On the other 
hand he was clever enough to perceive that to- 
hold them very long would be sure to lead to 
disaster, for their friends would institute a. 
search and at the same time telegraph an 
account of their disappearance all over the 
country. 

“ Tears ter me like I’ve ketched bigger game 
’an my trap ’ll hold,” he thought, as he stood 
in the door- way surveying his victims. 

“ What ye all a doin’ a monkeyin’ round^ 
these yer premerses, anyhow?” he demanded. 
“ W’y c’udn’t ye jest wait ’ll I sent for ye ter 
kem yer ? ” 

“ It’s a sort of surprise party, my dear sir,’^ 
said Cattleton. “ Don’t you see? ” 

“S’prise set o’ meddlin’ Yankees a foolin^ 
roun’ wher’ they air not got no business at,”' 
responded Tolliver, “ that’s w’at I calls it.” 

“ Where’s your pantry? ” inquired Punner^ 
“ I’m as hungry as a wolf.” 

“ Hongry, air ye ? What’d ye ’spect ter git 
ter eat at er still-house, anyhow? Hain’t ye 


126 A Fortnight of Folly. 

got no sense er tall ? Air ye er plum blasted 
eejit ? ” 

Tolliver made these inquiries in a voice and 
manner suggestive of suppressed but utter wrath. 

“ Oh he’s always hungry, he would starve in 
a feed-store,” exclaimed Cattleton. “Don’t pay 
the least attention to him, Mr. Tolliver. He’s 
incurably hungry.” 

“W’y ef the man’s really hongry — ” T /diver 
began to say in a sympathetic tone. 

“Here,” interrupted Hubbard gruffl;)^ “let 
ns out of this immediately, can’t you? The 
ladies can’t bear this foul air much long-^r, it s 
beastly.” 

“ Mebbe hit air you ’at air a running this yer 
ohebang,” said Tolliver with a scowl. “ I’ll jes’ 
let ye out w’en I git ready an’ not a minute 
sooner, nother. So ye’ve hearn my tin horn.” 

Miss Stackpole and Miss Crabb made notes 
in amazing haste. 

Hubbard shrugged his heavy shoulders and 
bit his lip. He was baffled. 

“Do you think they’ll kill us?” murmured 
Miss Moyne in Dufour’s ear. 

Dufour could not answer. 

Crane and his “ pap’s uncle Pete” were still 
hobnobbing over the jug. 

“ Yer’s a lookin’ at ye, boy, an’ a hopin’ agin 
hope ’at ye may turn out ter be es likely a man 
es yer pap,” the old man was saying, preliminary 
to another draught. 

Crane was bowing with extreme politeness in 


A Fortnight of Folly. 127 

acknowledgement of the sentiment, and was. 
saying : 

“ I am told that 1 look like my father ” 

‘ Yes, ye do look a leetle like im,” inter- 
rupted the old man with a leer over the jug,. 
“ but I’me say at it air dern leetle, boy, dern 
leetle I” 

Punner overhearing this reply, laughed uproar- 
iously. Crane appeared oblivious to the whole 
force of the joke, however. He was simply 
waiting for his turn at the jug.’ 

“ As I wer’ a sayin’,’’ resumed the old man,, 
“yer’s er hopin’ agin’ hope, an’ a lookin’ at 
ye ” 

“ How utterly brutal and disgusting ! ” cried 
Mrs. Nancy Jones Black. “ I must leave here, I 
cannot bear it longer ! This is nothing but a 
low, vile dram-shop ! Let me pass ! ” 

She attempted to go through the doorway^ 
but Tolliver interfered. 

“ Stay wher’ ye air,” he said, in a respectful 
but very stern tone. “Ye can’t git out o’ yer 
jist yit.” 

“Dear me! Dear me!” wailed Mrs. Black, 
“what an outrage, what an insult! Are you 
men ? ” she cried, turning upon the gentlemen 
near her, “ and will you brook this ? ” 

“Give me your handkerchiefs again,” said 
Cattleton, “and I will once more poke out my 
head ; ’tis all that I can do ! ” 

“Shoot the fust head ’at comes out’n thet 
ther winder, Dave ! ” ordered Tolliver, speaking 
to some one outside. 


128 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

“ I don’t care for any handkerchiefs, tliank 
yon,” said Cattleton, “ I’ve changed my mind.” 

Miss Moyne was holding Dufour’s arm with a 
nervous clutch, her eyes were full of tears, and 
she was trembling violently. He strove to quiet 
her by telling her that there was no danger, 
that he would shield her, die for her and all 
that ; but Tolliver looked so grim and the situa- 
tion was so strange and threatening that she 
could not control herself. 

“ Goodness ! but isn’t this rich material,” Miss 
Crabb soliloquized, writing in her little red 
book with might and main. “ Bret Harte never 
discovered anything better.” 

“ Miss Henrietta Stackpole was too busy 
absorbing the human interest of the interview 
between the two Cranes, to be more than indi- 
rectly aware of anything else that was going on 
around her. 

“Ye needn’t be erfeard as ter bein’ hurt, boy,” 
said the old man, “not es long es yer pap’s 
uncle Pete air eroun’ yer. Hit ain’t often ’at I 
meets up wi’ kinfolks downyer, an’ w’en I does 
meet up wi’ ’em I treats ’em es er Southern 
gen’l’man orter treat his kinfolks.” 

“Precisely so,” said Crane, taking another 
sip, “ hospitality is a crowning Southern virtue. 
When I go up to Louisville Henry Watterson 
and I always have a good time.” 

“ Spect ye do, boy, spect ye do. Louisville 
use ter be a roarin’ good place ter be at.” 

Tolliver, whose wits had been hard at work, 


A Fortnight of Folly. 129 

now proposed what lie called “ terms o’ pay-roll, 
like what they hed in the war.” 

“Ef ye’ll all take a oath an’ swa’ at ye’ll 
never tell nothin’ erbout nothin,” said he, “w’y 
I’ll jest let ye off this yer time.” 

“That is fair enough,” said Dufour, “we are 
not in the detective service.” 

“Then,” observed Tolliver, “ef I ken git the 
'tention of this yer meetin’, I move ’at it air 
-jerby considered swore ’at nothin’ air ter be 
said erbout nothin’ at no time an! never. Do ye 
all swa’ ? ” 

“ Yes I ” rang out a chorus of voices. 

“Hit air cyarried,” said Tolliver, “an’ the 
meetin’ air dismissed, sigh er die. Ye kin all 
go on erbout yer business.” 

The pedestrians filed out into the open air 
feeling greatly relieved. Crane lingered to have 
a few more passages with his sociable and hos- 
pitable grand-uncle. Indeed he remained until 
the rest of the party had passed out of sight up 
the ravine and he did not reach the hotel until 
far in the night, when he sang some songs under 
Miss Moyme’s window. 

Taken altogether, the pedestrians felt that 
they had been quite successful in their excur- 
sion. 

Dufour was happiness itself. On the way 
hack he had chosen for himself and Miss Moyne 
a path which separated them from the others, 
giving him an opportunity to say a great deal 
to her. 

How it is a part of our common stock of 
9 


1 30 A Fortnight of Folly. 

understanding that when a man h.as an excel- 
lent and uninterrupted opportunity to say a 
great deal to a beautiful young woman, he usu- 
ally does not find himself able to say much; 
still he rarely fails to make himself under- 
stood. 

They both looked so self-consciously happy 
(when they arrived a little later than the rest 
at Hotel Helicon) that suspicion would have 
been aroused but for two startling and all-ab- 
sorbing disclosures which drove away every 
other thought. 

One was the disclosure of the fact that Du- 
four was not Dufour, but George Dunkirk, and 
the other was the disclosure of the fact that the 
high sheriff of Mt. Boab County was in Hotel 
Helicon on important official business. 

Little Mrs. Philpot was the first to discover 
that the great publisher really had not practiced 
any deception as to his name. Indeed her 
album showed that the signature therein was, 
after all, George Dunkirk and not Gaspard 
Dufour. The autograph was not very plain, it 
is true, but it was decipherable and the mistake 
was due to her own bad reading. 

If the sheriff had been out of the question the 
humiliation felt by the authors, for whom Dun- 
kirk was publisher and who had talked so out- 
rageously about him, would have crushed them 
into the dust; but the sheriff* was there in his 
most terrible form, and he forced himself upon 
their consideration with his quiet but effective 
methods of legal procedure. 


A Fortnight of Folly, 


131 


XX. 

“Gaslucky has been caught in a wheat cor- 
ner at Chicago,’’ Lucas explained, “and has 
been squeezed to death.” 

“Dead!” cried Punner, “it’s a great loss.. 
We’ll have to hold a meeting and pass 
res ” 

“We’ll have to get out of this place in short 
order,” said Lucas, “ the •sheriff has levied an 
attachment on the hotel and all it contains.” 

“What!” 

“ How’s that?” 

“ Do you mean that the house is to be shut 
up and we turned out ? ” 

“Just that,” said Lucas. “The sheriff has 
invoiced every thing, even the provisions on 
hand. He says that we can’t eat another bite 
here.” 

“ And I’m starving even now I ” exclaimed 
Punner. “I could eat most anything. Let’s, 
walk round to Delmonico’s, Cattleton.” 

“But really, what can we do?” demanded 
Ferris, dolefully enough. 

“Go home, of course,” said Cattleton. 

Ferris looked blank and stood with his hands, 
thrust in his pockets. 

“ I can’t go home,” he presently remarked. 

“Why?” 

“ I haven’t money enough to pay my way.” 

“ By George 1 neither have 1 1 ” exclaimed 
Cattleton with a start. 


132 A Fortnight of Folly. 

“ That is precisely my fix,” said Lucas 
gravely. 

“ You eclio my predicament,” said Peck. 

“ My salary is suspended during my absence,” 
said Punner, with his eyes bent on the floor. 

Little Mrs. Philpot was speechless for a time 
as the force of the situation broke upon her. 

“ Squeezed in a wheat corner ? ” inquired 
Miss Stackpole, “what do you mean by that? ” 

“ I mean that Gaslucky got sheared in the 
big deal the other day at Chicago,” Lucas 
explained. 

“ Got sheared ? ” 

“Yes, the bulls sat down on him.” 

“Oh, you mean a speculation — a — ” 

“Yes, Gaslucky was in for all he was worth, 
and they run it down on him and flattened him. 
A gas-man’s no business in wheat, especially in 
Chicago; they spread him out, just as the 
sheriff’s proceedings have flattened all oui 
hopes for the present.” 

“ It’s just outrageous ! ” cried little Mrs. Phil- 
pot, finding her voice. “ He should have noti- 
fied us, so that — ” 

“ They didn’t notiiy him. I guess,” said Cat- 
tleton. 

“ No, he found it out afterwards,” remarked 
Lucas, glancing gloomily toward where Dun- 
kirk and Miss Moyne stood, apparently in light 
and pleasant conversation. 

Viewed in any light the predicament was a 
peculiar and distressing one to the guests of 
Hotel Helicon. The sheriff*, a rather ignorant, 


133 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

but very stubborn and determined man, held 
executions and writs of attachment sued out by 
Gaslucky creditors, which he had proceeded to 
levy on the hotel and on all the personalty 
visible in it belonging to the proprietor. 

“ ’ Course,” said he, “ hit’ll be poorty hard on 
you’ns, but I can’t help it, I’ve got ter do my 
juty, let it hurt whoever it will. Not er thing 
kin ye tech at’s in this yer tavern, ’ceptin’ 
what’s your’n, that air’s jest how it air. So 
now mind w'at yer a doin’.” 

The servants were idle, the dining-room closed, 
the kitchen and pantries locked up. Never was 
there a more doleful set of people. Mrs. Nancy 
Jones Black thought of playing a piece of sacred 
music, but she found the grand piano locked) 
with its key deep in the sheriff’s pocket. 

The situation was made doubly disagreeable 
when at last the officer informed the guests that 
they would have to vacate their rooms forth- 
with, as he should proceed at once to close up 
the building. 

“ Heavens, man, are you going to turn us out 
into the woods?” demanded Peck. 

“Woods er no woods ” be replied, “ye’ll hev 
ter git out’n yer, right off.” 

“But the ladies, Mr. Sheriff,” suggested Fun- 
ner, “no Southern gentleman can turn a lady 
out of doors.” 

The officer actually colored with the force of 
the insinuation. He stood silent for some time 
with his eyes fixed on the floor. Presently he 
looked up and said: 


134 ^ Fortnight of Folly. 

“The weeming kin stay till mornin’.” 

“Well they must have something to eat,’' 
said Punner. “ They can’t starve.” 

“Thet’s so,” the sheriff admitted, “they kin 
hev a bite er so.” 

“ And we ” 

“ You men folks cayn’t hev a dorg gone mouth- 
ful, so shet up ! ” 

“ Well,” observed Cattleton, dryly, “it appears 
the odds is the difference between falling into 
the hands of moonshiners and coming under the 
influence of a lawful sheriff.” 

“I know a little law,” interposed Bartley 
Hubbard with a sullen emphasis, “ and I know 
that this sheriff has no right to tumble us out 
of doors, and for my part ” 

“Fur yer part,” said the sheriff coolly, “fur 
yer part. Mister, ef ye fool erlong o’ me I’ll 
crack yer gourd fur ye.” 

“ You’ll do what? ” 

“ I’ll stave in yer piggin.” 

“ I don’t understand.” 

“ W’y, blame yer ignorant hide, wha’ wer’ ye 
horned and fotch up ? I’ll jest knock the ever- 
lastin’ head off’n ye, thetas ’zac’ly w’at I says. 
Mebbe ye don’t understan’ ihetV' 

“Yes,” said Hubbard, visibly shrinking into 
himself, “I begin to suspect your meaning.’* 

Miss Crabb was taking notes with enthusias- 
tic rapidity. 

Dunkirk called the sheriff to him and a long 
conference was held between them, the result 
of which was presently announced. 


135 


A Fortnight of Folly. 

“ I heve tliort it over,” said the quiet officer 
of the law, “ an’ es hit appear thet w’at grub air 
on han’ an’ done cooked might spile afore it 
c’u’d be sold, therefore I proclamate an’ saj at 
you’ns kin stay yer tell termorrer an’ eat w’at’s 
cooked, but tech nothin’ else.” 

Cattleton and Punner applauded loudly. To 
everybody the announcement was a reprieve of 
no small moment, and a sigh of relief rustled 
through the groups of troubled guests. Those 
who had been down the ravine were very tired 
and hungry ; the thought of a cold luncheon to 
them was the vision of a feast. 

Dunkirk had a basket of wine brought down 
from his room and he made the sheriff sit 
beside him at the table. 

“We may as well make the most of our last 
evening together,” he said, glancing jovially 
around. 

“We shall have to walk down the mountain 
in the morning, I suppose,” remarked Bartley 
Hubbard. 

“ That’s jest w’at’s the matter,” observed the 
sheriff. 

“ But the ladies, my dear sir, the ladies ” 

began Punner. 

“The weeming, they’ll hev kinveyances, 
young man, so ye kin jest shet up ef ye please,” 
the officer interrupted, with a good-natured wink 
and a knowing wag of his head. 

A disinterested observer would have noted 
readily enough that the feast was far from a 
banquet. There was Ferris, for instance, 


136 A Fortnight of Folly. 

muncliing a biscuit and sipping his wine and 
pretending to enjoy Punner’s sallies and Cattle- 
ton’s drolleries, while down in his heart lay the 
leaden thought, the hideous knowledge of an 
empty pocket. Indeed the reflection was a 
common one, weighting down almost every 
breast at the board. 

One little incident did make even Ferris for- 
get himself for a moment or two ; it was when 
deaf Miss Nebeker misinterpreted some remark 
made by Hubbard and arose with a view to 
reciting The JerseymavUs Jewsharp^ with a new 
variation, “Oh, Jerseyman Joe had a Jewsharp 
of gold,” she began, in her most melodious 
drawl. She could not hear the protesting 
voices of her friends and she misinterpreted the 
stare of the sheriff. 

“For the good heaven’s sake, Hubbard,” 
cried Lucas, “do use your influence: quick, 
please, or I shall collapse.” 

Bartley Hubbard took hold of her dress and 
gently pulled her down into her chair. 

“ The sheriff objects ! ” he yelled in her ear. 

“ After dinner ? ” she resignedly inquired, 
“ well, then after dinner, in the parlor.” 

When the feast had come to the crumbs, 
Dunkirk arose and said : 

“We all have had a good time at the Hotel 
Helicon, but our sojourn upon the heights of 
Mt. Boab has been cut short by a certain chain 
of mishaps over which we have had no control, 
and to-morrow we go away, doubtless forever. 


137 


A fortnight of Folly. 

I feel like saying that I harbor no unpleasant 
recollections of the days we have spent together.’^ 

Cattelton sprung to his feet to move a vote 
of thanks “to the public-spirited and benevolent 
man who built this magnificent hotel and threw 
open its doors to us.” 

It was carried. 

“ Now then,” said Lucas, adjusting his glasses 
and speaking in his gravest chest-tones, “ I move 
that it be taken as the sense of this assembly, 
that it is our duty to draw upon our publisher 
for money enough to take us home.” 

The response was overwhelming. 

Dunkirk felt the true state of affairs. He 
arose, his broad lace wreathed with genial 
smiles, and said : 

“ To the certain knowledge of your unhappy 
publisher your accounts are already overdrawn, 
but in view of the rich material you have been 
gathering of late, your publisher will honor 
you draughts to the limit of your expenses 
home.” 

Never did happier people go to bed. The 
last sleep in Hotel Helicon proved to be the 
sweetest. 

Far in the night, it is true, some one sang 
loudly but plaintively under Miss Moyne’s 
window until the sheriff awoke and sallied forth 
to end the serenade with some remarks about 
“ cracking that eejit’s gourd; ” but there was no 
disturbance, the sounds blending sweetly with 
the dreams of the slumberers. They all knew 
that it was Crane, poor fellow, who had finally 


138 A Fortnight of Folly. 

torn himself away from his father’s fascinating 
nncle. 


XXI. 

The retreat from Hotel Helicon was pictur- 
esque in the extreme. There had been much 
difficulty in finding vehicles to take the retiring 
guests down the mountain to the railway station, 
but Tolliver had come to the rescue with a 
mule, a horse, a cart, and an ox. These, when 
added to the rather incongruous collection of 
wagOQS and carts from every other available 
source, barely sufficed. Tolliver led the mule 
with Ferris on its back, while Miss Crabb and 
Miss Stackpole occupied the ox-cart, the former 
acting as driver. 

“ Good-bye and good luck to yel ” the sheriff 
called after them. “ Mighty sorry ter discom- 
mode ye, but juty air juty, an’ a officer air no 
respecter of persons.” 

Mrs. Nancy Jones Black sat beside Crane in a 
rickety wagon, and between jolts gave him 
many a word of wisdom on the subject of strong 
drink, which the handsome Bourbon poet stowed 
away for future consideration. 

Dunkirk and Miss Moyne rode upon the 
“hounds” of a naked wood- wain, as happy as 
two blue-birds in April, while Bartley Hubbard, 
with little Mrs. Philpot and her child and some 
other ladies, was in an old weather-beaten 
barouche, a sad relic of the ante-bellum times. 
For the rest there were vehicles of every sort 
save the comfortable sort, and all went slowly 


139 


A Fortnight of Folly, 

winding and zig-zagging down Mt. Boab toward 
the valley and the river. Why pursue them ? 
Once they all looked up from far down the slope 
«,nd saw Hotel Helicon shining like a castle of 
gold in the flood of summer sunlight. Its 
verandas were empty, its windows closed, but 
the flag on its wooden tower still floated bravely 
in the breeze, its folds appearing to touch the 
soft gray -blue sky. 

* * sK * * * 

A year later Crane and Peck. met at Saratoga 
and talked over old times. At length coming 
down to the present, Crane said : 

“ Of aU of us who were guests on Mt. Boab, 
Miss Moyne is the only one who has found 
success. Her story. On The Heights^ is in its 
seventieth edition.” 

“ Oh, well,” said Peck, “ that goes without 
the saying. Anybody could succeed with her 
ehance.” 

“ Her chance, why do you say that? ” 

“Have n't you heard? Ah, I see that the 
news has not yet penetrated the wilds of Ken- 
tucky. The open secret of Miss Moyne’s suc- 
cess lies in the fact that she has married her 
publisher.” 

A silence of some minutes followed, during 
which Crane burned his cigar very rapidly. 

“ What fools we were,” Peck presently ven- 
tured, “ to be fighting a duel about her ! ” 

“ Ho, sir,” said Crane, with a far-away look 


A Fortnight of Folly, 


in his eyes, “ no, sir, I would die for her right 
now.’* 

So the subject was dropped between them 
forever. 

Some of Gaslucky’s creditors bought Hotel 
Helicon at the sheriff’s sale, but it proved a bar- 
ren investment. 

The house stands there now, weather-beaten 
and lonely on the peak of Mt. Boab, all tenant- 
less and forlorn. 

As to Tolliver’s still-house I cannot say, but 
at stated intervals Crane receives a small cask 
marked: “J’yful juice, hannel with keer/^ 

which comes from his Pap’s uncle Pete.” 


THE END. 



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